“Pleasure? Pleasure, Gardy? Ha! It’s a long time since I’ve met the lady, m’boy. But a chap’s got to do what he can to keep from being bored. They did it—a little. I’m bored now. Do something, Gardy, say something. Hang it, man; can’t you do as much for me as those two brutes? Simmons! Some other togs, please. These I’ve got on make me dopy.”
He strode down into the cabin, forgetting me absolutely in this new evanescent whim.
V
I stepped to the port rail and bared my head to the young Spring breeze. I was disgusted. The sense of something uncleanly seemed to cling to me from the spectacle on the fore-deck and I was grateful for the antiseptic feel of the wind with its pure odors.
“Pretty raw, wasn’t it, Mr. Pitt?”
I looked up and saw Pierce, the young wireless operator, standing beside me.
“Yep. I feel that way about it, too,” he went on. “Not that I’ve got anything against seeing a good battle any time, ’cause I was raised back o’ the Yards in Chicago, and no more need be said. But that—that go forward, that was too raw. Garvin, he’s a sure ’nough pug—he stayed ten rounds with Sharkey once when Tom was starting, but the poor stew was about ready to have the ‘willies’; and the poor dinge was seeing snakes. Naw, it was too raw. Ear-eating and that kind of stuff. They hadn’t ought to have matched ’em. They couldn’t put up half a battle, the shape they was.”
“I didn’t object to it on those grounds,” I said, and as I looked at his merry, freckled face I was forced to smile. “Though I can appreciate your artistic disapproval. It disgusted me because it was so useless and brutal.”
“That’s what I said,” he responded promptly. “It was useless, because it wasn’t half a go, and brutal because they wasn’t in shape to stand the punishment.”
“We are slightly apart in our view-points, I am afraid, Mr. Pierce.”