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Updated: May 15, 2025
All of which was, perhaps, true, even though Devore had an unnecessarily harsh way of stating the case; the part about the Shawnee Club was true, at any rate, and I used to think it possibly had something to do with Devore's feelings for Major Stone. Not that Devore gave open utterance to his feelings to the major's face.
"Wait until you've been here a few weeks and you'll have another name for him." "Well, anyway, he's got a good carrying voice," I said, rather at a loss to understand Devore's bitterness. "Great," he mocked venomously; "you can hear it a mile. I hear it in my sleep. So will you when you get to know him, the old bore!" In due time I did get to know Major Stone well.
He gave a bellow and heaved himself up on the stage and, before any of us could move, grabbed Devore by the throat with his left hand and jammed him back, face upward, on the table until I thought Devore's spine would crack.
The major's blaring notes would cross-cut Devore's nerves as with a dull and haggling saw. He Devore I mean disliked the major with a dislike almost too deep for words. It had got to be an obsession with him. "You fellows that were born down here have to stand for him," he said once, when the major had stumped out on his short legs after an unusually long visit.
He shoved his completed narrative back under the roll-top of Devore's desk, where the city editor would see it the very first thing when he came to work; and as he straightened up with a little grunt of satisfaction and stretched his arms out the last of his fine-linen shirts, with a rending sound, ripped down the plaited front, from collarband almost to waistline.
In our home town each of us had known somebody very much like him there used to be at least one Major Stone in every community in the South, although most of them are dead now, I guess so we all could understand him. When I say all I mean all but Devore. The major's mere presence would poison Devore's whole day for him.
The episode to which I would here direct attention came to pass in the middle of a particularly hot week in the middle of that particularly hot and grubby summer, at a time when the major was still wearing the last limp survivor of his once adequate stock of frill-bosomed, roll-collared shirts, and when Devore's scanty stock of endurance had already worn perilously near the snapping point.
His right hand shot into his coat pocket, then, quick as a snake, came out again, showing the fat fist armed with a set of murderously heavy brass knucks, and he bent his arm in a crooked sickle-like stroke, aiming for Devore's left temple. I've always been satisfied and so has Devore that if the blow had landed true his skull would have caved in like a puff-ball. Only it never landed.
When the major came at eight as usual, Devore was waiting for him at the door of the city room; and as they went upstairs together, side by side, I saw Devore's arm steal timidly out and rest a moment on the major's shoulder. The major was the first to descend. Walking unusually erect, even for him, he bustled into the telephone booth.
Above me a shadow of something hung for the hundredth part of a second, something white flashed over me and by me, moving downward whizzingly; something cracked on something; and Mink Satterlee breathed a gentle little grunt right in Devore's face and then relaxed and slid down on the floor, lying half under the table and half in the tin trough where the stubby gas jets of the footlights stood up, with his legs protruding stiffly out over its edge toward his friends.
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