"You will, will you!" Fargus cried, bounding up. "And I'll have a judge on you! Oscar, Peter, put him out! Throw him out! Joseph, call a policeman!"
The waiters, who had suffered the usual indignities from the fallen chief, without waiting a second urging seized the struggling Bastien and propelled him from the office.
Fargus, with lips still trembling from his excitation, listened with clenched fists to the dwindling tumult that announced the progress of the eviction. Then gradually his breathing grew quieter, the anger passed from his eyes, he reseated himself, held his head a moment in his hands, then, stretching back, threw out his arms and smiled a smile of vast contentment. Peace had returned to his soul.
His history, from the age of nineteen, had been the record of a ledger, of the hour of rising, eating, working, and returning to sleep. He spent not one cent more one day than another. He woke invariably at half past four he was in bed by one o'clock. He spent five cents on carfare each morning, and saved five by walking home each night. He lunched and dined at his restaurants. His one extravagance was to breakfast at a coffee stall, kept by a woman who thirty years before had jilted him for a longshoreman, where for six cents he might remind her each day of the fortune she had flung aside.
So much for the history of the man. Before nineteen his youth had been one of storm. Three great disillusionments had marked the period, the greatest which can befall a man, in the loyalty of a friend, in the virtue of his mother, and in the love of a woman. The friend was a newsboy, the mother a pedler, and the woman a waitress in a restaurant on the wharves. Society, which regards honor, virtue, and faith, and the capability of sorrow, peculiar to itself, can see nothing but the ridiculous in such tragedies. To the frail boy, however, with his misanthropic bent, these three trials changed the complexion of the sky and brought a rage against humanity, and with it an abiding, vindictive purpose to treat it always as an enemy.
His worldly progress had been the journey of the mole. Burrowing through his youth, obscure and undivined, he had broken ground one day and emerged, to the surprise of his associates, rich and successful. Starting as a chore boy, rising to a waiter in a small oyster house near the docks, he had progressed to the proprietorship of one lunch counter, to the ownership of a restaurant, of an oyster house, of three; until the city knew him at last as the owner of half a dozen resorts, Fargus's West Side Oyster Rooms, Fargus's Bowery Oyster Parlors, Fargus's Broadway Oyster & Chop House, etc. He had but one vanity, a weakness pardonable in self-made men, he had come to regard himself as the discoverer of the oyster.
On the night of the interview with Bofinger, to the upsetting of all routine he left his office an hour earlier. The hat boy, hastily summoned, arrived trembling, but to the amazement of every one Fargus departed without a word of reproof.
The violence which had eased his craving for cruelty had departed and left him timid and infatuated, with the elusive figure of Sheila running before him and mocking his desires. Instead of following his invariable course down Broadway, he turned into the quieter side streets seeking an opportunity for reflection.
He did not walk like the generality of men, who propel themselves from the back foot, but like the animals who draw themselves forward by their claws. This peculiarity, which was not so noticeable when he was in a hurry, sprang into notice the moment his gait relaxed, when he appeared, as to-night, to be prowling over the ground, alert as a panther to bound forward a dozen feet.
So immersed was he in the perplexities of his passion that he failed to notice the sudden swooping down of three soldiers of the night, until a hand fell on his shoulder and an angry voice commanded: