A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill

								

staggered to the table where he sank down with his head on his arms.
What had happened in the corner, Chick could not tell, but in a few
minutes his young man came swiftly into his line of vision, and shook
the limp figure half lying on the table.
“Get up, Dill! For God's sake! Are you too drunk to crank up your
machine? As soon as I can get that blood stopped I must go for a
doctor.”
The dazed eyes of the drunken man looked at him in helpless terror!
“I can't stay here!”
“You've got to stay here! Can't you see you are in no fix to run a
machine? Brace up, you idiot; we've got to do something and do it
quick. Go down and try to crank up. Here's the door key! I'll be there
as soon as I can get the blood stopped!”
The man at the table staggered to the door, passed through the hall, so
close to Chick that he almost trod upon him, then went swaying down the
stairs, steadying himself by wall and banister. Chick heard the side
door slam, and the chug of the machine, then realized that it was
turning the corner.
The young man in the room rushed frantically to the window and leaned
out, then he said something savage under his breath, and plunged out
into the passage and headlong down the steps. Chick heard the side door
bang again, and a moment later the gallop of a horse.
Then everything was still, but the noisy beating of his heart that
threatened to burst its confines. Through the crack he saw the table
with its broken tumblers, and the whisky drip, dripping on the floor; he
saw the chairs overturned, and the gas-jet flickering in the wind from
the broken window.
The thing he could not see was what lay in the corner, the huddled-up,
blood-stained hulk of a something for which a smiling, fat woman and six
tow-headed youngsters were waiting across the common. Chick crawled to
the head of the stairs, and as he reached the top step his hand touched
a hard object. He picked it up and held it to the light, and as he did
so, the joy that often blossoms on the brink of tragedy was his for a
moment. It was the riding whip whose handle he had fallen heir to that
afternoon!
Down the steps, through the door and out into the rain-soaked night he
sped; across the common, through the switch-yard, and down the narrow,
noisome darkness of Bean Alley. Over a ram-shackled fence, and up a
dilapidated porch he clambered like a cat, until he reached the small
loft in the Flathers' two-roomed mansion which he called home.
Here the hardened criminal, the breaker of laws, and of slot machines,
the would-be burglar, threw himself upon an old mattress, and with two
grimy fists in his eyes sobbed out his heart to the rafters above.
It was not repentance for his sins, neither was it terror of the secret
that was locked behind his inarticulate lips, although both of them had