“Shine” looked up at an “invitation” above him, and drank again to quench a sudden heat in his mouth.
“Say,” he said thickly, “I don’t like this beer.”
“Mine’s all right,” Doherty assured him. “I’ll get y’ another.”
Before he returned, “Shine” had drained the first glass. He took the second unsteadily, grinning at Doherty to cover the fact that he could not think of what he had intended to say. He drank thirstily, put down his glass and blinked. He had become conscious of a great lapse of time. It seemed to him that he had been silent for an hour.
He began to talk very busily, but without any great success in saying anything; and to lubricate his difficulty in articulation he drank and drank. “How’s that?” Doherty asked him, with each successive glass, and “Shine” assured him—as well as he could—that it was “A’ right a’ right.”
“How’s that?” Doherty asked at last, exultingly; and his voice came to “Shine” as a thin rustle of hoarse sound. The wall seemed to be bellying like a curtain in a draught. “I’m fu’,” he said, and laughed tipsily.
The room had begun to swim around him, and he drank again, to steady it. It revolved faster and faster. He shut his eyes and tried to sit tight, but could not keep his balance. The motion dizzied him. He rested his head on the table, feeling very tired and very sleepy; and he decided that he would remain there until the world around him returned to a state of rest.
When he woke again, in a semi-stupor—it seemed only a few minutes later—he felt someone kicking the soles of his bare feet. He was lying on the floor of a room, stripped to his undershirt and trousers. He could not see Doherty anywhere. A stranger was saying, “Look-a-here, ‘Shine.’ That partner o’ yours, Doherty, was in to see me this mornin’. He said yuh wanted a job ballyhooin’. He said yuh’d do me a barefoot dance fer the price of a pair o’ boots. Is that right?”
He grinned a grin of malice that showed the gold in all his huge teeth; and “Shine” recognized “Goldy” Simpson.