“Beautiful!” yelled Fireman Carter, leaping to his feet. The scorn in his voice could not be rendered by a phonograph. Poor man! He was about to knock the light out of those gray eyes, to spoil his own image, and nothing is so trying to a man’s temper.
“Hunh!” he continued. “Shows just about how much intelligence you got—beautiful! It’s a—lie—it’s fuzzy-water gas—there ain’t nothing to it at all—d’ye understand that?”
This last came out so fiercely that Mary Ellen faltered as she said she did.
“All right,” said Fireman Carter. “Now, I want to tell you just one thing: I ain’t the man to back-cap no man, when I come to get cooled down—not with a girl nor nothing else.” He tapped his knee with a perpendicular forefinger. “Not with a girl nor nothing!” he repeated. “Understand that?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Now I’m going to tell you the God’s truth. Holtzer’d been making his cracks about how he only had to speak and you’d fall on his neck, until he had me so sore I ached wherever m’ clothes touched me. So, when I see him coasting down the roof, the one thing in my mind was that he’d go feeling sure that he was the star with you. I couldn’t stand that. No, sir! I couldn’t; so down I goes after him. When I snaked him up on the roof I tells him, ‘Cuss your thanks! I want this much out of you, you flappy-footed slob—you go to Mary Ellen to-day and see whether she’ll take you or not—I’ll bet you three months’ pay agin a cigaroot you get turned down.’ Now, I was within my rights there—but”—Fireman Carter stopped, wiped his hands on his handkerchief, wiped his forehead, blew his nose and swallowed hard. “But,” he continued bravely, “if all the yawp that pup of a newspaper kid got rid of has had anything to do with changing results, I don’t care for any of the pie. There wasn’t no ‘laying down his life for another’ nor anything of the kind in the whole play. It was just like I’m telling you. Well, that’s all. I—I thought you might like to hear about it.”
There was a lamentable change in the strong voice at the last words. The speaker stared at the door and drummed on his cap until the silence became unendurable, then he raised his eyes slowly, as a condemned man might to the gallows.
There sat Mary Ellen, drinking him in, still beatified. The meekest man who ever esteemed himself poor relation to the worm that squirmeth could not have mistaken the meaning of that glance. It was simply adoration.
He straightened up and stared at her open-mouthed.
“I’ll be durned if I believe she’s heard one word I said!” thought Fireman Carter.