From time to time Spike's boxing manner grew tense for a period of days. He tightened up, as Sharon put it, and left a sore and battered apprentice while he went off to some distant larger town to fight, stepping nonchalantly aboard the six-fifty-eight with his fighting trunks and shoes wrapped in a copy of the Newbern Advance, and shifting his gum as he said good-bye to Wilbur, who would come down to see him off.
Sometimes Spike returned from these sorties unscathed and with money. Oftener he came back without money and with a face—from abrasive thrusts—looking as if a careless golfer had gone over him and neglected to replace the divots. After these times there were likely to follow complicated episodes of dentistry at the office of Doctor Patten. These would render the invincible smile of Spike more refulgent than ever.
The next birthday of Merle Whipple was celebrated at a time when Spike had been particularly painstaking in view of an approaching combat. Not only did he leave his young friend with an eye that compelled the notice, an eye lavishly displaying all the tints yet revealed by spectroscopic analysis, and which by itself would have rendered him socially undesirable, but he bore a swollen nose and a split and puffy lip; bore them proudly, it should be said, and was not enough cast down, in Winona's opinion, that his shameful wounds would deter him from mingling with decent folk. Indeed, Winona had to be outspoken before she convinced him that a birthday party was now no place for him. He would have gone without misgiving, and would have pridefully recounted the sickening details of that last round in which Spike Brennon had permitted himself to fancy he faced a veritable antagonist. Still he cared little for the festivity.
He saw Patricia from a distance in River Street, but pulled the dingy cap lower and avoided her notice. She was still bony and animated and looked quite capable of commanding his attendance over eighteen holes of the most utterly futile golf in all the world. His only real regret in the matter of his facial blemishes was that Spike came back with the mere loser's end of an inconsiderable purse, and had to suffer another infliction of the most intricate bridge work at the hands of Doctor Patten before he could properly enjoy at the board of T-bone Tommy that diet so essential to active men of affairs.
CHAPTER XII
Once more the aging Wilbur Cowan stood alone by night thrillingly to watch the arched splendour of stars above and muse upon the fleeting years that carried off his youth. The moment marked another tremendous epoch, for he was done with school. Now for all the years to come he could hear the bell sound its warning and feel no qualm; never again need sit confined in a stuffy room, breathing chalk dust, and compel his errant mind to bookish abstractions. He had graduated from the Newbern High School, respectably if not with distinguished honour, and the superintendent had said, in conferring his rolled and neatly tied diploma, that he was facing the battle of life and must acquit himself with credit to Newbern.
The superintendent had seemed to believe it was a great moment; there had been a tremor in his voice as he addressed the class, each in turn. He was a small, nervous, intent man whose daily worries showed plainly through the uplift of the moment, and Wilbur had wondered what he found to be so thrilled about. His own battle with life—he must have gone out to the fight years ago under much the same circumstances—had apparently brought him none of the glory he was now urging his young charges to strive for. He had to stay in a schoolroom and breathe chalk dust.
Whatever the battle of life might be, he was going to fight it out-of-doors; not like imprisoned school-teachers and clerks and bookkeepers in First National banks. Only when alone under that splatter of stars did he feel the moment big with more than a mere release from textbooks. Then at last he knew that he had become a man and must put away childish things, and his mind floated on the thought, off to those distant stars where other boys had that night, perhaps unwittingly, become men.