"I'd rather hear it to-morrow night."
"Don't care what you'd rather. I'm going to tell you to-night," persisted Fred, with the irritable querulousness of a child.
"But I go out on the bus with the girls," I said. "And that leaves at 5:30."
"Tha' 's true," said Fred. "Tell you what I'll do. I'll start off now, and I'll meet you at the end of the yards when the bus comes out. See?"
I nodded. Fred settled his hat more crookedly on his head, and, with an unlighted cigar twisting loosely in his mouth, went staggering down the aisle.
Hermann came over to my desk, and when I told him what Fred had said, he advised me to slip off the bus quickly and make a run for the nearest car. He said if Fred "got a grip" on me, he'd never let go "till he had sobered up."
I asked Hermann how long that would take, and he said:
"Well, sometimes he goes on a long drunk, for weeks at a time. It depends on who is with him. If he can get any one to drink with him, he'll keep on and on, once he's started. Once a prize-fighter just got a hold of him and punched him into sensibility, and he didn't touch a drop for a year afterward. He can, if he tries, sober up in a few hours. He goes months without touching a thing, and then all of a sudden he reverts."
Hermann then told me that Fred had once been jilted by a girl in Milwaukee, and that had started him to drinking.
As the bus took us through the yards, I thought how terrible and sad it was for a man who was in such a condition to be left to his own devices. It was just as if one left a helpless baby to mind himself, or threw a poor sick person out upon the street, expecting him to be cured without treatment. What was drink but a disease, anyhow? And I said to myself that I wished I were a prize-fighter. Fred had been good to me. I come of a race, on my mother's side, which does not easily forget kindnesses, and somehow I could think of nothing save how Fred had treated me that first day, and had given me a chance when no one else would.