Plain Mary Smith: A Romance of Red Saunders

by Henry Wallace Phillips

She stood a moment, relieved, but still doubtful. "I don't know but what I should," she said. Then I got in the argument that went every time, on every question, in those parts. "Why, Miss Hitty!" I says, "how you talk! Think of the cost of it!"

She was so grateful she threw both arms and her parasol around my neck and kissed me then and there. "I won't!" she says, stamping her foot, "I won't! I won't!" and she swept into the house real spirited, like a high-strung mouse.

So it come I was Miss Hitty's champion.

Algy Anker happened to see Miss Hitty kiss me, and, of course, I heard from it. All the gay wags in town took a fly out of me. Even old Eli led me mysteriously to one side and whispered he believed in helping young fellers, so, when I was getting my outfit—he winked—why, he'd make a big reduction in tinware. I stood most of the gaffing pretty well, although I couldn't stop at any place without adding to the collection of rural jokes, but at last one man stepped over the line that separates a red-head from war.

There was always a crowd of country loafers around the tavern. A city loafer ain't like a country loafer. The city loafer is a blackguard that ain't got a point in his favor, except that he's different from the country loafer.

One day I had to go by the tavern and I see Mick Murphy tilted back in his chair, hat over eyes, thumbs in suspenders; big neck busting his shirt open, big legs busting through the pants' legs, big feet busting through the ends of his curved-up shoes, and a week's growth of pig-bristles busting out of his red face. Mick was the bold bully of the rough crowd—fellers from twenty to twenty-five. He worked till he got money enough to buy whisky, then he got drunk and licked somebody.

The course of such lads is pretty regular. Mick was about a year from robbing hen-roosts. Next to hen-roosts comes holding up the lone farmer. Then the gang gets brash entirely, two or three are killed, and the rest land in the pen. You wouldn't believe hardly what kiddish minds these ignorant, hulking brutes have sometimes, nor how, sometimes, they come to the front, big, bigger than life-size. A painter wouldn't waste a minute putting down Mick Murphy as a thing of beauty. Little bits of eyes, near hid with whisky bloat; big puffy lips, stained with tobacco juice till they looked like the blood was coming through; dirty-handed, dirty-clothed, and dirty-mouthed—yah! And still—well, when I remember how that bulldozer went up a burning flight of stairs, tore a burning door off with them big dirty hands, and brought a little girl down through a wallow of flames, taking the coat off his back to wrap around her, and how the pride of the man come out when the mother stumbled toward him, calling on God to reward him, and he straightened under the pain and said, "Ah, that's all right, ledy! 'F your ol' man'll stand a drink an' a new shirt we'll call it square." The son-of-a-gun never left his bed for six weeks—why, he was broiled all down one side—why, when I remember that, I can't call up such a disgust for old Mick.

As I said, I see Mick Murphy leaning back in his chair at the tavern. Of course, he had a word to say about me and Miss Hitty. Now, the bare sight of Mick used to make the hair stand up on the back of my neck and growls boil inside of me. I just naturally disliked that man. So I sassed him plenty. He got mad and threatened to slap my face. I sassed him more, and he did slap my face. In one twenty-fifth of a second I caught him on his rum-bouquet and sent him plumb off his feet—not bad for a sixteen-year-old, when you consider the other party was an accomplished rough-houser. Yes, sir, he went right down, clean, more from the quickness than the stuff behind the blow, as I hadn't anywheres near grew into my strength yet. The tavern crowd set up a roar, and then jumped to interfere, for Mick he roared, too, and made to pull me apart. The onlookers wouldn't stand for it. They weren't such high-toned gents, but a contest between a leggy kid and a powerful man looked too far off the level.

"You run," says one fellow to me. "We'll hold him." But hanged if I was going to run. My thoughts was a mix, as usual in such cases—most of it hardly thinking at all, and the rest a kind of white-hot wish to damage something, and a desire to hustle away from there before I got hurt. Then, too, it had reached the limit about Miss Hitty—I sure wasn't going to stand hearing her name mishandled by tavern loafers. Yet the principal cause for my staying was my anxiety to leave. That big, bellowing Irishman, dragging a half-dozen men to get at me, blood streaming down his face, and his expression far from agreeable, put a crimp in my soul, and don't you forget it. But I understood that this was my first man's-size proposition, and if I didn't take my licking like a man I never could properly respect myself afterward. So whilst my legs were pleading, "Come, Willie, let's trot and see mother—it will be pleasanter," I raked my system for sand and stood pat.

I knew a trick or two about assaulting your fellow-man as well as Mick, when you come to that. Fighting is really as good an education for fighting as sparring is, and perhaps a little better. It ain't so much a question of how you make your props and parries, as how much damage you inflict upon the party of the second part.