It was the first fight of Nathan’s career—a “kid-fight” perchance—but no less virile or significant on that account. For like many quiet, peaceable men, when aroused the boy became a fury. Lithe as a cat, nimble as a bantam-weight, he pounded Peter Taro until the blood-smeared youngster fled.
Those were days of bliss and nights of heartburn. Vividly the hours come back that we spent before kitchen mirrors, steam-misty with boiling cabbage or wash-water of our homes, tying and retying our “cravats”, plastering down our hair with pilfered bay rum. If we had the front of our hair parted and well pasted down, and the toes of our shoes reasonably shined, we were groomed satisfactorily for hymeneal campaigning.
That each of us possessed a hat-lifting cowlick in the rear like the business paraphernalia of a small porcupine and that our heels were eternally yellow with mud were among the happy paradoxes of boyhood. We were as we were when we looked in our mirrors—when we posed for phrenological inventory and profile analysis. And besides, a good soldier in either war or love never looks behind anyhow.
II
We had followed the two little girls homeward one afternoon, chaffing and mauling each other as we would never have done if they had not been somewhere about to see, when we returned along the Green River in the afterglow. Eventually we threw ourselves down on a knoll. While we idled there, the valley grew hushed and the stars came out.
“Say, Nat,” I demanded, “whatcher goin’ to be when you grow up?”
“A writer and a poet,” he answered without hesitation.
I pondered this. We were emerging from the period when manhood meant freedom to turn pirate or Indian fighter. If Nathan had declared his intention of becoming a locomotive engineer or a clown in a circus, I should not have hesitated to take him at his word. But a writer—a poet!
“Aw, go on!” I retorted. “Poets don’t make no money!”
“I dunno’s I wanner make money.”