“Thank you!” he said, half-earnestly. “I’d have thought you wouldn’t like to see me muss things up, that way.” He was letting his voice slip away from him, both in volume and in manner, and the car was crowded. A panic necessity for concealment took possession of her.
“Surely we’ve evaded the police—let’s get out and have our walk through the Quarter.” 205
“I’m with you.” Kearney Street, that thoroughfare which gathered into its two miles every element in American life, here struck its hill rise. Sheer above them hung Telegraph Hill, attained by latticed sidewalks, half stairs. The Latin quarter thronged and played all about them in the dusk and the fresh lamplight. And again, mood and spirits rose in her. The event whose swift, kaleidoscopic action still danced on her retina, the very stimulus of brutal youth in action, had conspired with the perfect night to raise her above herself.
“Oh, talk to me about it!” she said. “How did you do it—what do you call it—I want to hear you tell about it.”
“I guess you saw it all—just a plain uppercut. Those blame city crowds would see a man killed before they’d think of anything but the show. I’ve always said that, and now I know it. I caught sight of the old man side-on and I saw he was hurt by something more than a punch. Far be it from me to spoil a good scrap, but that wasn’t a fair shake. So I dropped you and started in. And then I saw that nail. I made a slip there,” he let his voice fall in self-depreciation—“I should 206 have kicked that chunk of board away, instead of diving for it. He beat me to it. The rest was so easy it was a shame to take the money. Up comes his head and up comes my guard”—he stopped in the street to illustrate—“and he couldn’t use his club any more than a kitten. I’d have let him go, if he hadn’t hit at me—and clipped me. For a second, I could have bit nails in two. When I pulled myself in close, there was his chin just above me—a be-auty target. And an uppercut was his medicine.” Bertram jerked his right hand up from his hip to illustrate the uppercut. Then he screwed up his face and felt of his right shoulder. “He marked me some,” he said in explanation.
“Did he hurt you?” she asked with real concern. It ran into her mind that the conventional hero of romance makes his wound a scratch before his lady. If she expected that from Bertram Chester, he disillusionized her.
“Well, you don’t take a punch like that, even glancing on your shoulder, without something getting loose,” he replied. “I shouldn’t be surprised if I’d slipped a cog or a tendon or something.”
“Why—let’s go home and see about it.” 207
“Oh, it isn’t bad enough for that!” Then he fell into reminiscences. In their toilsome passage up the hen-coop sidewalks of Broadway, he gesticulated—with constrained motions of his right arm—loosed the sparkle of his energetic, magnetic talk upon her. She drew close to him. Gradually, as the steps became steep, her hand slipped under his arm. She was only half-conscious of this motion; her consciousness was full of a softening toward him, a leaning upon that strength which she had seen in action. On his side, he did not fail to notice it—this first movement in her which had seemed like an advance. He stopped his buzz of talk at one moment and all the lines of his face relaxed as though he were about to say something softer and deeper. But he only caught his breath and changed to another story. He had remembered—and just in time, he thought—the advice of Kate Waddington.
But in spite of that remembrance, he permitted himself the luxury of being natural; and he talked continually until they were within the Tiffany doors.