Then Gar set out to make good in the rôle of a prophet. At first he tried to disgust me. He kept up a rapid fire of the most vulgar profanity. That night he started several fights, and put the light out in the dormitory. The men, yelling for light, ran about, smashing every one in their way. When things quieted down, he asked me how I liked the entertainment. I complained that it was tame.
“Gee!” he said, “youse must ’a’ been a barker at Coney!”
I kept him sober for a week; then he went back to his cups, and in a frenzy he nearly killed a bartender. I found him hiding in a rag-picker’s basement. It appeared that the man had used the name of Christ in a vile connection, and Gar became a champion of the Nazarene.
“Hangin’,” said Gar, “is too dead easy fur d’ sucker what keeps cool when Jesus’s insulted. Dat’s d’ fust time I ever soaked a guy on account of religion, an’, b’jiminy, I’m tickled t’ death over it.”
When Gar squared himself again, he began a wholesale house-cleaning in the bunk-house. He persuaded the management to make several outlays, and he gave himself to the work. We installed a book-case and books, and Gar himself selected some chromos to hang around. Over a dent in the wall, made by a chair with which he had tried to kill a man, he hung this motto: “Let Brotherly Love Continue.”
For ten years Gar struggled to be master of himself. He spent some years in a soldiers’ home, but it was against his principles to die in such a tame institution. He wound up where he had spent his strange career—in Chatham Square.
A bunk-house man—old and half blind—was crossing the street, and roaring down on him came a Third Avenue car. It was Gar’s one opportunity, and, with a spring, he pushed the old fellow on his face out of danger, but the wheels pinned Gar to the rails.
“I kin tell ye, boys,” he said to the few friends who lingered around his cot at the close, “I’ll do no simperin’ around God wid hard-luck stories; I’ll take what’s comin’ an’ vamoose to m’ place—whether up or down.”
There was a slight pressure of the big hands, then they became limp and cold.
The bouncer was dead.