The collegian looked somewhat concerned. Barry stopped breathing.
“Well,” continued Welty, “you mayn't believe it, for we've kept it really quiet, one of them girls is really dead gone on me.”
The collegian opened his mouth wide, and Barry began to nervously tap his hand upon the table.
“It's the one,” said Welty, “who wears the big blond wig. Her name's Emi—”
There was the noise of upsetting plates, bottles, and glasses, of a man's feet rapping up against the bottom of a table and his head thumping down against the floor. There was the sight of an agile youth leaping across an overturned table and alighting with one foot at each side of the prostrate form of an astonished man, whose gray whiskers were spattered with blood. There was the quick gathering of a crowd, an excited explanation on the part of the collegian, a slow recovery on the part of the man on the floor, and Barry McGettigan's vengeance was complete.
For, by one of those incredible coincidences that have the semblance of fatality, the football player's fist had reduced Melrose Welty's nose to a flatness which the nose of no imaginable Shandy ever has surpassed.
XIII. — THE WHISTLE
She was the wife of a railway locomotive engineer, and the two lived in the newly built house to which he had taken her as a bride a year before.