“See a fren'.”
Badeau looked at him. Bruce grew so nervous that he forgot his caution.
“What's matter? What you lookin' me like that for? You're fren' o' mine, Hunch. Shake han's, ol' man. Shake——-”
Badeau struck him without a word. Bruce showed fight, and in a moment they were rolling about the floor. Billy, up forward, heard the noise, and, tiptoeing along the deck in his underclothes, peered down the open gangway. He saw Bruce, his face red with drink and rage, break away from Badeau and seize a knife from the rack on the bulkhead. Badeau sprang forward. The table was jammed into the stove. Then the light went out. There was a fall, then a silence. Billy groped cautiously down the gangway.
“That you, Billy?” came in Badeau's voice. “Get a match. Guess I smashed him pretty hard.”
As soon as he and Billy could get Bruce undressed and into his bunk, Hunch ran for a doctor. Bruce finally went to sleep with a stitched-up scalp, a purple eye, and a broken' rib. In the morning they got underway for Liddington, Billy and Hunch doing all the work. Bruce was quiet during the morning, but in the afternoon, and after they reached Liddington, he started several times to blurt out an apology, which Hunch each time cut short. At supper-time, Hunch propped him up with blankets.
“Say, Hunch, I s'pose you ain't got nothing to say to me.”
“Guess not.”
“Well, say, Hunch, I—got a date with her to-night; I ain't fit to ever see her again, but—she'll wonder why I don't come. Say, you go up there, Hunch. Come on. Tell her I'm sick.”
So Hunch went. And when he sat stiffly in the parlor (in Bruce's checked tie, for fear that she might recognize the red one), he wished himself miles away, or dead and buried, and he wondered what he could say. But after a while Mamie came in, blushing. His tongue tripped over her name, and they both laughed.
“S'pose you're s'prised to see me,” he said.
“Why—I don't know. I'm always glad to see you, Mr. Badeau.”
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