It was now five-thirty. Ben had gone out of the house into the orchard at three twenty-five. In another forty minutes Gant would waken, dress, and build the morning fires.
“Ben,” said Harry Tugman, as they walked out of the relaxed office, “if Jimmy Dean comes messing around my press-room again they can get some one else to print their lousy sheet. What the hell! I can get a job on the Atlanta Constitution whenever I want it.”
“Did he come down to-night?” asked Ben.
“Yes,” said Harry Tugman, “and he got out again. I told him to take his little tail upstairs.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Ben. “What did he say?”
“He said, ‘I’M the editor! I’m the editor of this paper!’ ‘I don’t give a good goddam,’ I said, ‘if you’re the President’s snotrag. If you want any paper today keep out of the pressroom.’ And believe me, he went!”
In cool blue-pearl darkness they rounded the end of the Post Office and cut diagonally across the street to Uneeda Lunch No. 3. It was a small beanery, twelve feet wide, wedged in between an optician’s and a Greek shoe parlor.
Within, Dr. Hugh McGuire sat on a stool patiently impaling kidney beans, one at a time, upon the prongs of his fork. A strong odor of corn whisky soaked the air about him. His thick skilful butcher’s hands, hairy on the backs, gripped the fork numbly. His heavy-jowled face was blotted by large brown patches. He turned round and stared owlishly as Ben entered, fixing the wavering glare of his bulbous red eyes finally upon him.
“Hello, son,” he said in his barking kindly voice, “what can I do for you?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Ben laughing contemptuously, and jerking his head toward Tugman. “Listen to this, won’t you?”
They sat down at the lower end. At this moment, Horse Hines, the undertaker, entered, producing, although he was not a thin man, the effect of a skeleton clad in a black frock coat. His long lantern mouth split horsily in a professional smile displaying big horse teeth in his white heavily starched face.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he said for no apparent reason, rubbing his lean hands briskly as if it was cold. His palm-flesh rattled together like old bones.
Coker, the Lung Shark, who had not ceased to regard McGuire’s bean-hunt with sardonic interest, now took the long cigar out of his devil’s head and held it between his stained fingers as he tapped his companion.
“Let’s get out,” he grinned quietly, nodding toward Horse Hines. “It will look bad if we’re seen together here.”
“Good morning, Ben,” said Horse Hines, sitting down below him. “Are all the folks well?” he added, softly.
Sideways Ben looked at him scowling, then jerked his head back to the counterman, with a fast bitter flicker of his lips.
“Doctor,” said Harry Tugman with servile medicine-man respect, “what do you charge to operate?”
“Operate what?” McGuire barked presently, having pronged a kidney bean.
“Why — appendicitis,” said Harry Tugman, for it was all he could think of.
“Three hundred dollars when we go into the belly,” said McGuire. He coughed chokingly to the side.
“You’re drowning in your own secretions,” said Coker with his yellow grin. “Like Old Lady Sladen.”
“My God!” said Harry Tugman, thinking jealously of lost news. “When did she go?”
“To-night,” said Coker.
“God, I’m sorry to hear that,” said Harry Tugman, greatly relieved.
“I’ve just finished laying the old lady out,” said Horse Hines gently. “A bundle of skin and bones.” He sighed regretfully, and for a moment his boiled eye moistened.
Ben turned his scowling head around with an expression of nausea.
“Joe,” said Horse Hines with merry professionalism, “give me a mug of that embalming fluid.” He thrust his horsehead indicatively at the coffee urn.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ben muttered in terms of loathing. “Do you ever wash your damned hands before you come in here?” he burst out irritably.
Ben was twenty. Men did not think of his age.
“Would you like some cold pork, son?” said Coker, with his yellow malicious grin.
Ben made a retching noise in his throat, and put his hand upon his stomach.
“What’s the matter, Ben?” Harry Tugman laughed heavily and struck him on the back.
Ben got off the stool, took his coffee mug and the piece of tanned mince pie he had ordered, and moved to the other side of Harry Tugman. Every one laughed. Then he jerked his head toward McGuire with a quick frown.
“By God, Tug,” he said. “They’ve got us cornered.”
“Listen to him,” said McGuire to Coker. “A chip off the old block, isn’t he? I brought that boy into the world, saw him through typhoid, got the old man over seven hundred drunks, and I’ve been called eighteen different kinds of son of a bitch for my pains ever since. But let one of ’em get a belly ache,” he added proudly, “and you’ll see how quick they come running to me. Isn’t that right, Ben?” he said, turning to him.
“Oh, listen to this!” said Ben, laughing irritably and burying his peaked face in his coffee mug. His bitter savor filled the place with life, with tenderness, with beauty. They looked on him with drunken, kindly eyes — at his gray scornful face and the lonely demon flicker of his smile.
“And I tell you something else,” said McGuire, ponderously wheeling around on Coker, “if one of them’s got to be cut open, see who gets the job. What about it, Ben?” he asked.
“By God, if you ever cut me open, McGuire,” said Ben, “I’m going to be damned sure you can walk straight before you do.”
“Come on, Hugh,” said Coker, prodding McGuire under his shoulder. “Stop chasing those beans around the plate. Crawl off or fall off that damned stool — I don’t care which.”
McGuire, drunkenly lost in revery, stared witlessly down at his bean plate and sighed.
“Come on, you damned fool,” said Coker, getting up, “you’ve got to operate in forty-five minutes.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Ben, lifting his face from the stained mug, “who’s the victim? I’ll send flowers.”
“ . . . all of us sooner or later,” McGuire mumbled puffily through his puff-lips. “Rich and poor alike. Here today and gone tomorrow. Doesn’t matter . . . doesn’t matter at all.”
“In heaven’s name,” Ben burst out irritably to Coker. “Are you going to let him operate like that? Why don’t you shoot them instead?”
Coker plucked the cigar from his long malarial grinning face:
“Why, he’s just getting hot, son,” said he.
Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hill-flanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark.
At the curb now, young Dr. Jefferson Spaugh brought his Buick roadster to a halt, and got out, foppishly drawing off his gloves and flicking the silk lapels of his dinner jacket. His face, whisky-red, was highboned and handsome; his mouth was straightlipped, cruel, and sensual. An inherited aura of mountain-cornfield sweat hung scentlessly but telepathically about him; he was a smartened-up mountaineer with country-club and University of Pennsylvania