They listened and some peered into the darkness beyond. They could see only the other dime collector watching his feet. Luke climbed to the bandstand. Some went to one side of the room, a few to the other. Luke counted the hands.
By a terrible application of brakes and a violent twisting of accelerators, the heavy engined motorcycles ground into a tight, whirling, dust-churning circle in the center of the street as the drivers threw down one heel and lay the machines on their sides, jerkined Indians. They made three revolutions, knocking stones against the gymnasium walls. The Red Devils worked and struggled in their glistening saddles to brake and then explode the engines as the silver ornaments, the enormous taillamps, the sleek black gas tanks ending in their crotches blazed in the light from the doorway. Their gauntlets grasped and pulled on the widespread steel horns.
Several of the light cycles were doubly ridden but in the speed, the smoke, the clamor, it was impossible to tell which were men and which women. At the end of the last circle the lead machine and its small tightly belted driver cut off in a straight line toward the south and in a thin, flashing column the Red Devils disappeared into the black country and the exhaust flares clipped out one by one.
The raised windows and grates rattled for a moment with the sudden, unpleasant chock and starting of engines and the band began to play.
“They had jewels all over them,” said the boy.
Luke wiped his face, throat and upper chest with his neckerchief. “We don’t want to hear about it,” he said.
n o one wants to hear what I got to say,” said Ma.
Day or night could not be measured by what she did or the way she dressed. Her bedding on the floor was always open and roughed as if she had just climbed wearily from it or was about to lay herself down again for a moment’s uneasy rest. She napped all through the night. The sun might be breaking or clouding over as she stood at the stove changing her dressing, reaching for the roll of bandage between the red bottle and pepper tin, peering at her forearm sore by the light of the coals. She stood on a little patch of carpet before the stove summer or winter, in the early evening or the long middle breath of the night, and wore her stocking cap and slippers, daytime dress and high socks.
“My sore’s been ailing me again,” she said.
Ma had been outlying Gov City for ten remembered years, her cooking chimney seen always smoking, a Lampson marketing for her and talking about her every week, but no one knew when or how the sore had sprung upon her arm. Because of the vermin in the chicken wings, or some recurrent bone breath in the victuals, or some flowering growth cropped up in the slough of the river bed, it never healed but gave her trouble when she stirred or rolled over. She tended it with the same frown and preoccupation as possessed the cowboy when he lanced or cauterized the discolored wound of a pit viper.