“Evil” reached for a glass and hurled it at random. The shot slid him down again into the gutter; the glass fell wide with a glorious crash. “Low-brow” seized a bottle, but was too weak to hold it. It slipped to the floor, almost an echo of the other smash. “Simple” came up behind, with only the friendliest intentions, no doubt, and put one beery arm about the professor’s shoulder. Blynn turned swiftly at the heavy touch and embraced him—without love, one may be sure—thereby projecting upon his shirtfront the full contents of that beer-mug, a cavernous vessel holding, at least, a quart. The vile odor was a lasting memory.
The embrace had been a clumsy thing, but the divorce was swift and artistic. As Blynn instinctively shoved “Simple” forward—the cold beer against the chest gave impetus to the push—the barkeep’s grip on “Simple’s” collar sent him spilling backward. On the way he carried “Toothless” with him. “Sloth” never even looked around; he leaned comfortably against the bar and mumbled in his beer.
All these movements Blynn watched with interested eyes, caught every sound as if it were data for a book. One-half of his mind was a spectator, cool, undisturbed, careless of the outcome, concerned only with the spectacle; the other was saying over and over again, “26 Hogan street! 26 Hogan street!” and it was throbbing with rage.
“Here’s my money for one glass of ginger ale,” Blynn confronted the barkeep. “And I want my change—all of it, do you hear! You’ve robbed every drunken sot in the room except that vile cur,” pointing to “Evil” still sprawling in the gutter before the bar. “I’ve seen you steal their money out of their pay-envelopes. Give me my change, you viper!” He slapped a twenty-five cent piece on the sopping counter. “Give me my change, you bloodsucker, you poisoner, you—”
“Git out!” the barkeep yelled as he rushed at him. “Git out!”
He yelled much more. He told Blynn things concerning his past that were biologically impossible and made prophetic assertions about the future. His speeches were wild enough but his actions were genuinely savage. Before Blynn could get into any proper pugilistic position the barkeep had welted him across the side of the head with a huge fist.
The Lady had called him a first-rate book! A book? Not much!
It would be a pleasant thing to say here that Allen Blynn had trained in his youth with a football team or that he had taken recent boxing lessons from Corbett’s sparring partner. The truth is that his physical condition was only that of an abstemious “professor” the spry side of thirty, who jogged daily about the gymnasium track, or pulled a few perfunctory chest-weights, just to give edge to the evening meal. But that unexpected blow on the side of the head maddened him and summoned triple strength.
In one spring he had that barkeep by the throat and had carried him to the floor over the sprawling legs of “Simple.” Seizing him by his flap ears he was fiercely pounding his head against the floor, when he found himself lifted in the air by two bluecoats, turned about and sent forward at a fearful angle, through the swing-doors, into the darkened alley of a street. As he went out someone smashed the side of his head with a bottle, and he always maintained the theory that an officer near the door had assisted accurately with a boot; but his greatest joy as he sprawled on the pavement was the feeling—later discovered to be an illusion—that he still held in his hands the remains of the barkeep’s ears.
On the way to 26 Hogan street he laughed and sang and exulted in strange words. Before his mind he summoned the barkeep and that Satan’s limb, “Evil,” and invited them to “Come on!” Names he called them, mouthfilling, rhythmic cadences; anathema that never had been in his vocabulary before, but which every man who has mingled with other men knows by instinct.