“Come on, you girls,” he commanded. “Get onto yourself, Bert. We got to get outa this. We can't fight an army.”
He led the retreat, holding Saxon's arm, and Bert, giggling and jubilant, brought up the rear with an indignant Mary who protested vainly in his unheeding ears.
For a hundred yards they ran and twisted through the trees, and then, no signs of pursuit appearing, they slowed down to a dignified saunter. Bert, the trouble-seeker, pricked his ears to the muffled sound of blows and sobs, and stepped aside to investigate.
“Oh! look what I've found!” he called.
They joined him on the edge of a dry ditch and looked down. In the bottom were two men, strays from the fight, grappled together and still fighting. They were weeping out of sheer fatigue and helplessness, and the blows they only occasionally struck were open-handed and ineffectual.
“Hey, you, sport—throw sand in his eyes,” Bert counseled. “That's it, blind him an' he's your'n.”
“Stop that!” Billy shouted at the man, who was following instructions, “Or I'll come down there an' beat you up myself. It's all over—d'ye get me? It's all over an' everybody's friends. Shake an' make up. The drinks are on both of you. That's right—here, gimme your hand an' I'll pull you out.”
They left them shaking hands and brushing each other's clothes.
“It soon will be over,” Billy grinned to Saxon. “I know 'em. Fight's fun with them. An' this big scrap's made the day a howlin' success. What did I tell you!—look over at that table there.”
A group of disheveled men and women, still breathing heavily, were shaking hands all around.
“Come on, let's dance,” Mary pleaded, urging them in the direction of the pavilion.
All over the park the warring bricklayers were shaking hands and making up, while the open-air bars were crowded with the drinkers.
Saxon walked very close to Billy. She was proud of him. He could fight, and he could avoid trouble. In all that had occurred he had striven to avoid trouble. And, also, consideration for her and Mary had been uppermost in his mind.
“You are brave,” she said to him.
“It's like takin' candy from a baby,” he disclaimed. “They only rough-house. They don't know boxin'. They're wide open, an' all you gotta do is hit 'em. It ain't real fightin', you know.” With a troubled, boyish look in his eyes, he stared at his bruised knuckles. “An' I'll have to drive team to-morrow with 'em,” he lamented. “Which ain't fun, I'm tellin' you, when they stiffen up.”
CHAPTER V
At eight o'clock the Al Vista band played “Home, Sweet Home,” and, following the hurried rush through the twilight to the picnic train, the four managed to get double seats facing each other. When the aisles and platforms were packed by the hilarious crowd, the train pulled out for the short run from the suburbs into Oakland. All the car was singing a score of songs at once, and Bert, his head pillowed on Mary's breast with her arms around him, started “On the Banks of the Wabash.” And he sang the song through, undeterred by the bedlam of two general fights, one on the adjacent platform, the other at the opposite end of the car, both of which were finally subdued by special policemen to the screams of women and the crash of glass.
Billy sang a lugubrious song of many stanzas about a cowboy, the refrain of which was, “Bury me out on the lone pr-rairie.”
“That's one you never heard before; my father used to sing it,” he told Saxon, who was glad that it was ended.
She had discovered the first flaw in him. He was tonedeaf. Not once had he been on the key.
“I don't sing often,” he added.
“You bet your sweet life he don't,” Bert exclaimed. “His friends'd kill him if he did.”
“They all make fun of my singin',” he complained to Saxon. “Honest, now, do you find it as rotten as all that?”
“It's … it's maybe flat a bit,” she admitted reluctantly.
“It don't sound flat to me,” he protested. “It's a regular josh on me. I'll bet Bert put you up to it. You sing something now, Saxon. I bet you sing good. I can tell it from lookin' at you.”
She began “When the Harvest Days Are Over.” Bert and Mary joined in; but when Billy attempted to add his voice he was dissuaded by a shin-kick from Bert. Saxon sang in a clear, true soprano, thin but sweet, and she was aware that she was singing to Billy.
“Now THAT is singing what is,” he proclaimed, when she had finished. “Sing it again. Aw, go on. You do it just right. It's great.”
His hand slipped to hers and gathered it in, and as she sang again she felt the tide of his strength flood warmingly through her.
“Look at 'em holdin' hands,” Bert jeered. “Just a-holdin' hands like they was afraid. Look at Mary an' me. Come on an' kick in, you cold-feets. Get together. If you don't, it'll look suspicious. I got my suspicions already. You're framin' somethin' up.”
There was no mistaking his innuendo, and Saxon felt her cheeks flaming.
“Get onto yourself, Bert,” Billy reproved.
“Shut up!” Mary added the weight of her indignation. “You're awfully raw, Bert Wanhope, an' I won't have anything more to do with you—there!”
She withdrew her arms and shoved him away, only to receive him
forgivingly half a dozen seconds afterward.
“Come on, the four of us,” Bert went on irrepressibly. “The
night's young. Let's make a time of it—Pabst's Cafe first, and then
some. What you say, Bill? What you say, Saxon? Mary's game.”
Saxon waited and wondered, half sick with apprehension of this man beside her whom she had known so short a time.
“Nope,” he said slowly. “I gotta get up to a hard day's work to-morrow, and I guess the girls has got to, too.”
Saxon forgave him his tone-deafness. Here was the kind of man she always had known existed. It was for some such man that she had waited. She was twenty-two, and her first marriage offer had come when she was sixteen. The last had occurred only the month before, from the foreman of the washing-room, and he had been good and kind, but not young. But this one beside her—he was strong and kind and good, and YOUNG. She was too young herself not to desire youth. There would have been rest from fancy starch with the foreman, but there would have been no warmth. But this man beside her. … She caught herself on the verge involuntarily of pressing his hand that held hers.
“No, Bert, don't tease; he's right,” Mary was saying. “We've got to get some sleep. It's fancy starch to-morrow, and all day on our feet.”
It came to Saxon with a chill pang that she was surely older than Billy. She stole glances at the smoothness of his face, and the essential boyishness of him, so much desired, shocked her. Of course he would marry some girl years younger than himself,