“Now, go back to Cooley and tell him I broke you,” Stone ordered, and turned on his heel.
By the time he reached the back door of the beer-garden he was limping most painfully, but when he rejoined his crowd he said nothing of the incident. In the brief time that it had taken him to go from the alley mouth to that table he had divined the significance of the whole thing. For the first time in his career he knew himself to be a systematically marked man, as he had systematically marked others; and he was not beyond reason. Thereafter, Bobby Burnit was in no more jeopardy from hired thugs, and for a solid year he kept up his fight, with plenty of material to last him for still another twelvemonth. It was a year which improved him in many ways, but Aunt Constance Elliston objected to the improvement.
“Bobby, they are spoiling you,” she complained. “They’re taking your suavity away from you, and you’re acquiring grim, hard lines around your mouth.”
“They’re making him,” declared Agnes, looking fondly across at the firm face and into the clear, unwavering eyes.
Bobby answered the look of Agnes with one that needed no words to interpret, and laughed at Aunt Constance.
“I suppose they are spoiling me,” he confessed, “and I’m glad of it. I’m glad, above all, that I’m losing the sort of suavity which led me to smile and tell a man politely to take it, when he reached his hand into my pocket for my money.”
“You’ll do,” agreed Uncle Dan. “When you took hold of the Bulletin, your best friends only gave you two months, But are you making any money?”
Bobby’s face clouded.
“Spending it like water. We have practically no advertising, and a larger circulation than I want. We lose money on every copy of the paper that we sell.”
Uncle Dan shook his head.