All their mirth vanished. They waited glumly through “Annie Laurie,” and fidgeted as the quartet quavered into “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River,” but when “My Old Kentucky Home” began, with moonlight effects on the back drop and cowbells tinkling, O’Leary got up suddenly and said:
“Hell! Let’s beat it.”
They emerged glumly on the sidewalk, while Flick swore copiously for the crowd and led the way down the avenue to Campeau’s, where they found a table in a noisy gathering thundered over by a dynamic orchestra.
“O’Leary, it’s no use,” said Flick; “we can’t get away from it.”
“Guess you’re right.”
They stayed there a long while, passing into the confidential stage, while Tootles consumed large quantities of ginger ale and sought desperately to stem the rising tide, which came rolling in blackly. They had yielded to their depression, reveling in it. While King O’Leary listened, jerking at his fingers, Flick reminisced of forgotten days in a little Western town, of white Christmases when the relations gathered in jingling sleighs and the table was crowned with a wild turkey at one end and a crackling pig at the other.
“With a roast apple in his snout, and a ribbon—a blue—no, a pink ribbon decorating his ornery little tail. King, I can taste that pig yet—fact—good pig—good old pig! What did we use to call him? Can’t remember.” He went off into a foggy search, dipping his finger in a puddle of water on the table and seeking to reconstruct it in the shape of his remembered idol. “Looked like that—just so. There’s the tail—see? We used to fight to get that tail, Lem, Minnie, and me—” He suddenly looked up, as though conscious of O’Leary’s staring silence. “I say, did you used to have pig—roast pig? No? Well, what sort of Christmas did you have?”
“There was only one that counted,” said King O’Leary, frowning stubbornly, “and that, son, we won’t talk about.”
“Why not?” said Flick indignantly. He added, as though in his clouded brain he had found the answer, “Secret sorrow—that it?”
“Call it that.”