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And the Saturday and Sunday week-end out of town which presently followed, with the astoundingly heavy dinners that accompanied it, brought them back in a week, sadder even than before. Monday morning was always a very busy morning in Hogarty's but never until along about noon.
There was a kind of satanic, methodical deadliness in Hogarty's directions to the other two men inside the ropes. Even while he was staring at him, fascinated, that hand-clapping stormed up again, and then swelled to a hoarse roar that went hammering to the roof. A figure passed Old Jerry, so close that the long robe which wrapped him brushed his knee.
Hogarty's hard eyes could be very hard hard and chilling as chipped steel and they were that now. He was only just beginning to awake to a realization of that profaned floor, but the smile upon Denny's mouth neither disappeared nor stiffened in embarrassment before that forbidding countenance. Instead he held out his hand a big, long-fingered, hard-palmed hand toward the ex-lightweight proprietor.
"Any objection, now that I've sworn allegiance, Flash, if I go out and present myself?" Hogarty's whole tense body began to relax, his lean face softened and his eyes lost much of their hardness and glitter as he shook his head in negation. "That's a little detail of the campaign which I had already assigned to you," he replied, and the inflection of his voice was perfect.
Utterly unconscious of Hogarty's threatening storm of protest, he sat and gazed and gazed, scarcely crediting his own eyes.
But they kept on coming, in spite of their lack of time and Hogarty's calm refusal to consider their arguments some of the younger men because they really did appreciate the sensation of flexible muscles sliding beneath a smooth skin, some of them merely because they liked to hear Hogarty's fluently picturesque profanity, always couched in the most delightfully modulated of English, when the activity of a particularly giddy week-end brought them back a little too shaky of hand, a little too brilliant of eye and a trifle jumpy as to pulse.
And, "You don't mean," he faltered, "Flash, you don't mean that you think that boy can stop " Hogarty's thin voice bit in and cut him short. "Think?" he demanded. "Think? I don't have to think any more! I know!" For a second he seemed to be pondering something; then he threw up his head again. And his startlingly sudden burst of laughter made Morehouse wince a little.
And as a clamor of many voices in the outer entrance heralded the arrival of the rest of Ogden's crowd: "Here comes the mob now. Come in and close the door." Morehouse, still from head to toe a symphony in many-toned browns, shed every shred of his facetiousness at Hogarty's crisply repeated invitation.
And the black felt hat and smooth black suit which he wore finished the picture and made the illusion complete. His face and figure, even there in the doorway of Hogarty's Fourteenth Street place, could have suggested but one thing to an observant man. He might have been a composite of all the New England Pilgrim Fathers who had ever braved a rock-bound coast. And Bobby Ogden was observing.
Monday morning was always a busy morning in Jesse Hogarty's Fourteenth Street gymnasium; busy, that is to say, along about that hour when morning was almost ready to slip into early afternoon.
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