“You said something about boxing once,” Drew was at the door of the shack, ready to depart for his day of scouting. “How’d you like to meet me at the club this evening for a few rounds?”
“Be great!” Johnny exclaimed enthusiastically. “You’ll find me rusty, though. Haven’t had gloves on for a long time.”
“Here’s the address.” Drew wrote on a bit of paper, and handed it to Johnny. “I’ll meet you in the lobby at nine o’clock.”
“Fine!”
With Drew gone, and only the distant rumble of the city to keep him company, Johnny sat down in Drew’s rocking chair to think. From time to time his gaze strayed to the wall where the revolver and the arrow hung.
“Life,” he thought, “has grown more complicated and—and more terrible. And yet, what a privilege it is to live!”
For the first time since he arrived on that freighter at midnight, he felt a desire to be far, far away from this great city and all that it stood for.
“Power,” he murmured, “great power, that is what a city stands for. Great power, great weakness, great success, gigantic failure, men of magnificent character, men of no character at all; that’s what you find in a city of three million people.”
At once his mind was far away. In his imagination he stood upon a small and shabby dock. A small and shabby village lay at the back of the dock. At his feet a dilapidated clinker-built rowboat bumped the dock. Oars were there, minnows for bait, and fishing tackle. Two miles up the bay was a dark hole where great muskies waved the water with their fins, where bass black as coal darted from place to place, while spotted perch, seeming part of the water itself, hung motionless, watching.
“Ah, to be there!” he breathed. “The peace, the simple joy of it all. To drop a minnow down there; to cast one far out, then to watch for the move that means a strike!