Garrity hitched up a frayed suspender and sneered.
“Boy scouts!” he repeated in a scornful tone. “You must be terrible hard up, Chick, to go hanging around that bunch of dubs.”
Conners flushed a little.
“Aw, I wasn’t hanging around ’em,” he protested. “I was just watching ’em do them stunts.”
“Stunts! Do you call them loony kid games stunts? Taking off their clothes and then seeing which can put ’em on quickest! I ain’t very shy of time, but would you catch me wasting it on that rot? Nix!”
Conners’ thin lips expanded in a grin.
“If you wasn’t watching ’em yourself how’d you get wise to what they was doing?” he countered.
Garrity took a long pull at the butt of a cigarette and flicked it into the street. Then he turned on Conners, chin thrust out aggressively.
“I don’t need no lifetime, like some guys, to catch on to what’s doing,” he remarked. “A glance while I was passing along the Green was plenty. Besides, I seen enough of ’em long before I come to this slow burg—parading around in their cute little uniforms an’ peddling stamps an’ the like. New York’s full of ’em.”
He pronounced it New Yoick. And as he swaggered there with legs wide apart, hands thrust deep into trousers’ pockets, shabby cap cocked on one side of an untidy mass of carroty hair, it was not hard to guess where he hailed from. Chick Conners eyed him with the admiring gaze of a satellite, beneath which was a touch of doubt and a little hint of protest.