Again he stopped and Denny, watching, saw the proprietor’s face glow suddenly with a savage sort of exultation. His eyes, half-veiled behind drooping lids that twitched a little, went unseeingly over the boy’s head as though they were visualizing a triumph so long anticipated that it had become almost a lost hope. Again that promise of something ominous blackened the pupils––something totally dangerous that harmonized perfectly with the snarl upon his lips.
Hogarty’s whole attitude was that of a man who wanted to believe and yet who, because he knew that the very measure of his eagerness made him doubly easy to convince, had resolved not to let himself accept one spurious proof. And all his skepticism was shot through and through with hate––a deadly, patient sort of hatred for someone which was as easy to see as it was hard for the big-shouldered boy to understand.
There was craft in the ex-lightweight’s bearing––a gentleness almost stealthy when he leaned forward a little, as if he feared that the first abrupt move or word on his part would frighten away that timid hope.
“I believe that you said some one sent you. You––you did not mention the name?”
Denny leaned over and picked up his coat from a chair beside the bench, searching the pockets until 197 he found the card which the plump, brown-clad newspaper man had given him. Without a word he reached out and put it in Hogarty’s hands.
It bore Jesse Hogarty’s Fourteenth Street address across its face. Hogarty turned it over.
“Introducing the Pilgrim,” ran the caption in the cramped handwriting of Chub Morehouse’s stubby fingers. And, beneath, that succinct sentence which was not so cryptic after all:
“Some of them may have science, and some of them may have speed, but after all it’s the man who can take punishment who gets the final decision. Call me up, if this ever comes to hand.”
Very deliberately Hogarty deciphered the words, lifted a vaguely puzzled face to Young Denny, who waited immobile––and then returned again to the card. He even nodded once in thorough appreciation of the title which Morehouse had given the boy; he smiled faintly as he remembered Denny as he had stood there in the entrance of the big room, a short while before, and realized how apt the phrase was. Then he began to whistle, a shrill, faint, monotonous measure, the calculating glitter in his eyes growing more and more brilliant.