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You got to learn to listen." He stepped forward, remembered and turned back into the cabin. There was womanish solicitude in the scrutiny he bent upon Garry Devereau's crookedly smiling face. "You and me was ordained to be friends," he declared oratorically, "because anybody that Steve O'Mara calls friend is good enough for me.
And to Steve the need of assuring that tall girl with the vivid lips and coppery hair of Garry Devereau's safety bulked quite as important as did the advisability of seeking immediately an informal interview with Dexter Allison, such as the latter himself had so genially suggested. But Fat Joe, squinting at his chief's broad back, misread the signs that morning.
He's either got to be so popular that they don't care much who he fights, so long as he's a good showman, or he's got to take them all on as they come. All the hard ones, and the harder the better, till one of 'em puts him to sleep." Devereau's voice acquired a whine, the plaintive note of a man whose sincere best efforts have gone unappreciated. "And I had it all figured out.
In a few short months they put Perry Blair, light-weight champion of the world, out on the sidewalk. It can't be done? It is done every day, in politics. It needs only a practiced hand. For a day or two following Devereau's unsatisfactory laconism nothing developed. And then a bombshell exploded. Hughie Gay made a statement. Blair had realized that he was no champion; he had feared even him, Gay.
But Blue Jeans, who had landed lightly on the gravel, saw what Devereau had missed. He saw that Tweed-Suit was afraid that she was numbed with fear. His single back-hand thrust sent Devereau spinning under a truck. "Your train?" "Yes." "Give me your bag." She obeyed him. They had told her that the train did not wait very long. His hand found her arm, a different touch than Devereau's.
Then Garry Devereau's head rolled over, ghastly loose and slack, and the plump one caught sight of a ragged gash in the senseless man's temple. "So-o, that's it?" he droned, and his complaining voice was deadly again. "So that's it! But he wasn't so far gone that he couldn't put up a tidy little battle, was he?
"Greetings, Sir Galahad!" he faltered. "And how are you, Steve and who might your fat friend be?" Of all the fragmentary pictures which those crowded twelve hours left registered upon Stephen O'Mara's brain, none proved more enduring than did the change which Garry Devereau's first haltingly weak but very sane greeting wrought in the expression on Fat Joe's pink visage that morning.
It would afford us some sort of a footing to work on then, other than black ooze and lilypads. Wouldn't it seem so to you?" Garry Devereau's agreement was quick with enthusiasm, but Fat Joe who was better schooled in those slow-syllabled discussions, barely nodded his head. "We'd still have that track north of here to lay," he advised, "when we work in from the south with steel."
For the older Devereau had grown up from a handsome, dark-skinned, reticent boy into a moody and cynical skeptic who, at the age of thirty, had put the muzzle of his own revolver against his temple and pulled the trigger, because as he phrased it, "he was tired of the game." The skepticism was already there in Garry Devereau's slow smile.
Squarely in front of the latter Steve halted and spoke with monotonous lack of haste. "You're going to tell me that you didn't mean that, Garry," he said quietly. "For I'm going to marry one of those women myself." Garret Devereau's face had been white. It went whiter now.
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