Archaeologists of a future age will doubtless, in their minute explorations of this region, come upon the petrified remains of golf balls in such number as will occasion learned dispute.  Found so profusely and yet so far from any known course, they will perhaps give rise to wholly erroneous surmises.  Prefacing his paper with a reference to lost secrets once possessed by other ancients, citing without doubt that the old Egyptians knew how to temper the soft metal of copper, a certain scientist will profoundly deduce from this deposit of balls, far from the vestiges of the nearest course, that people of this remote day possessed the secret of driving a golf ball three and a half miles, and he will perhaps moralize upon the degeneracy of his own times, when the longest drive will doubtless not exceed a scant mile.

For three days Sharon sprayed out over the landscape, into ideal golf-ball covert, where many forever eluded even the keen eyes of Wilbur Cowan, one hundred balls originally purchased by the selecter golfing set of Newbern.  Hereupon he refused longer to regard the wooden driver as a possible instrument of precision, and forever renounced it.  Elihu Titus heard him renounce it balefully in the harness room one late afternoon, and later entering that apartment found the fragments of a shattered driver.

It remained for Wilbur Cowan to bring Sharon into the game by another avenue.  A new campaign was entered upon, doubtfully at first by Sharon, at length with dawning confidence.  He was never to touch a wooden club.  He was to drive with an iron, not far, but truly; to stay always in the centre of the fairway and especially to cultivate the shorter approach shots and the use of the putter.  The boy laboured patiently with his pupil, striving to persuade him that golf was more than a trial of strength.  From secret lessons back of the stable they came at length to furtive lessons over the course at hours when it was least played.  John Knox McTavish figured at these times as consulting expert.

“It’s th’ shor-r-t game that tells th’ stor-r-r-y,” said John; and Sharon, making his whole game a short game, was presently telling the story understandably, to the vast pride of the middle man who provided endless balls for his lessons.

It was a day of thrills for them both when Rapp, Senior, publicly challenged and accepting with dreams of an easy conquest, bent down before the craft of Sharon Whipple.  Sharon, with his competent iron in a short half-arm swing ­he could not, he said, trust the utensil beyond the tail of his eye ­sent the ball eighteen times not far but straight, and with other iron shots coaxed it to the green, where he sank it with quite respectable putting.  Rapp, Senior, sliced his long drives brilliantly into shaded grassy dells and scented forest glades, where he trampled scores of pretty wild flowers as he chopped his way out again.  Rapp, Senior, made the course excitingly in one hundred and thirty-eight; Sharon Whipple, playing along safe and sane lines, came through with one hundred and thirty-five, and was a proud man, and looked it, and was still so much prouder than he looked that he shuddered lest it get out on him.  Later he vanquished, by the same tactics, other men who used the wooden driver with perfect form in practice swings.

Contests in which he engaged, however, were likely to be marred by regrettable asperities rising from Sharon’s inability to grasp the nicer subtleties of golf.  It seemed silly to him not to lift his ball out of some slight depression into which it had rolled quite by accident; not to amend an unhappy lie in a sand trap; and he never came to believe that a wild swing leaving the ball untouched should be counted as a stroke.  People who pettishly insisted upon these extremes of the game he sneeringly called golf lawyers.  When he said that he made a hole in nine, he meant nine or thereabouts ­approximately nine; nice people, he thought, should let it go at that.  So he became feared on the course, not only for his actual prowess but for his matchless optimism in casting up his score.  He was a pleased man, and considered golf a good game; and he never forgot that Wilbur Cowan had made him the golfer he was.  More than ever was he believing that Harvey D. Whipple had chosen wrongly from available Cowans.  On the day when he first made the Newbern course in, approximately, one hundred and twenty ­those short-arm iron shots were beginning to lengthen down the centre of the fairway ­he was sure of it.

It must be said that Sharon was alone in this conviction.  The others most concerned, had he allowed it to be known, would have been amazed by it ­Winona Penniman most of all.  Winona’s conviction was that the rejected Cowan twin conspicuously lacked those qualities that would make him desirable for adoption by any family of note, certainly not by Whipples.  He had gone from bad to worse.  Driving a truck had been bad.  There had been something to say in its favour in the early stages of his career, until the neophyte had actually chosen to wear overalls like any common driver.  In overalls he could not be mistaken for a gentleman amateur moved by a keen love for the sport of truck driving ­and golf was worse.  Glad at first of this change in his life work, Winona had been shocked to learn that golf kept people from the churches.  And the clothes, even if they did not include overalls, were not genteel.  Wilbur wore belted trousers of no distinction, rubber-soled sneakers of a neutral tint, and a sweater now so low in tone that the precise intention of its original shade was no longer to be divined.  A rowdyish cap completed the uniform.  No competent bank president, surveying the ensemble, would have for a moment considered making a bookkeeper out of the wearer.  He was farther than ever before, Winona thought, from a career of Christian gentility in which garments of a Sabbath grandeur are worn every day and proper care may be taken of the hands.

It was late in this summer that she enforced briefly a demand for genteel raiment, and kept the boy up until ten-thirty of a sleepy evening to manicure his nails.  The occasion was nothing less than the sixteenth birthday of Merle Whipple, to be celebrated by an afternoon festivity on the grounds of his home.  The brothers had met briefly and casually during Merle’s years as a Whipple; but this was to be an affair of ceremony, and Winona was determined that the unworthy twin should ­at least briefly ­appear as one not socially impossible.

She browbeat him into buying a suit such as those that are worn by jaunty youths in advertisements, including haberdashery of supreme elegance, the first patent-leather shoes worn by this particular Cowan, and a hat of class.  He murmured at the outlay upon useless finery.  It materially depleted his capital ­stored with other treasure in a tin box labelled “Cake” across its front.  But Winona was tenacious.  He murmured, too, at the ordeal of manicuring, but Winona was insistent, and laboured to leave him with the finger tips of one who did not habitually engage in a low calling.

He fell asleep at the final polishing, even after trying to fix his gaze upon the glittering nails of the hand Winona had relinquished, and while she sought to impress him with the importance of the approaching function.  There would be present not only the Whipples, but their guests, two girl friends of Patricia from afar and a school friend of Merle’s; there would be games and refreshment and social converse, and Winona hoped he would remember not to say “darn it” any time in such of the social converse as he provided; or forget to say, on leaving, what a charming time it was and how nice every one had been to ask him.  He dozed through much of this instruction.

Yet Winona, the next day, felt repaid for her pains.  Arrayed in the new suit, with the modish collar and cravat, the luminous shoes and the hat of merit, the boy looked entirely like those careless youths in the pictures who so proudly proclaim the make of their garments.  No one regarding him would have dreamed that he was at heart but a golf caddie or a driver of trucks for hire.  Winona insisted upon a final polish of his nails, leaving them with a dazzling pinkish glitter, and she sprayed and anointed him with precious unguents, taking especial pains that his unruly brown hair should lie back close to his head, to show the wave.

When he installed her beside him in Sharon Whipple’s newest car, pressed upon the youth by its owner for this occasion, she almost wished that she had been a bit more daring in her own dress.  It was white and neat, but not fancy dressmaking in any sense of the word.  She regretted for a moment her decision against pink rosebuds for the hat, so warmly urged by her mother, who kept saying nowadays that she would be a girl but once.  Winona was beginning to doubt this.  At least you seemed to be a girl a long time.  She had been a little daring, though.  Her stockings were white and of a material widely heralded as silkona.  Still her skirt was of a decent length, so that she apprehended no scandal from this recklessness.

When her genteel escort started the car and guided it by an apparently careless winding of the wheel she felt a glow that was almost pride in his appearance and nonchalant mastery of this abstruse mechanism.  She was frightened at the speed and at the narrow margin by which he missed other vehicles and obtruding corners.  When he flourished to an impressive halt under the Whipple porte-cochère she felt a new respect for him.  If only he could do such things at odd moments as a gentleman should, and not continuously for money, in clothes unlike those of the expensive advertisements!

She descended from the car in a flutter of pretense that she habitually descended from cars, and a moment later was overjoyed to note that her escort sustained the greetings of the assembled Whipples and their guests with a practiced coolness, or what looked like it.  He shook hands warmly with his brother and Patricia Whipple; was calm under the ordeal of introductions to the little friends Winona had warned him of ­two girls of peerless beauty and a fair-haired, sleepy-looking boy with long eyelashes and dimples.

These young people were dressed rather less formally than Winona had expected, being mostly in flannels and ducks and tennis shoes not too lately cleaned.  She was instantly glad she had been particular as to Wilbur’s outfit.  He looked ever so much more distinguished than either Merle or his friend.  She watched him as he stood unconcerned under the chatter of the three girls.  They had begun at once to employ upon him the oldest arts known to woman, and he was not flustered or “gauche” ­a word Winona had lately learned.  Beyond her divining was the truth that he would much rather have been talking to Starling Tucker.  She thought he was merely trying to look bored, and was doing it very well.

The little friends of Patricia, and Patricia herself, could have told her better.  They knew he was genuinely bored, and redoubled their efforts to enslave him.  Merle chatted brightly with Winona, with such a man-of-the-world air that she herself became flustered at the memory that she had once been as a mother to him and drenched his handkerchief with perfume on a Sabbath morning.  The little male friend of Merle stood by in silent relief.  Patricia and her little guests had for three days been doing to him what they now tried doing to the new boy; he was glad the new boy had come.  He had grown sulky under the incessant onslaughts.

The girl with black hair and the turquoise necklace was already reading Wilbur’s palm, disclosing to him that he had a deep vein of cruelty in his nature.  Patricia Whipple listened impatiently to this and other sinister revelations.  She had not learned palm reading, but now resolved to.  Meantime, she could and did stem the flood of character portrayal by a suggestion of tennis.  Patricia was still freckled, though not so obtrusively as in the days of her lawlessness.  Her skirt and her hair were longer, the latter being what Wilbur Cowan later called rusty.  She was still active and still determined, however.  No girl in her presence was going to read interminably the palm of one upon whom she had, in a way of speaking, a family claim, especially one of such distinguished appearance and manners ­apparently being bored to death by the attention of mere girls.

Tennis resulted in a set of doubles, Merle and his little friend playing Patricia and one of her little friends ­the one with the necklace and the dark eyes.  The desirable new man was not dressed for tennis, and could not have played it in any clothes whatever, and so had to watch from the back line, where he also retrieved balls.  Both girls had insisted upon being at his end of the court.  Their gentlemen opponents were irritated by this arrangement, because the girls paid far more attention to the new man than to the game itself.  They delayed their service to catch his last remark; delayed the game seriously by pausing to chat with him.  He retrieved balls for them, which also impeded progress.

When he brought the balls to the dark-eyed girl she acknowledged his courtesy with a pretty little “Thanks a lot!” Patricia varied this.  She said “Thanks a heap!” And they both rather glared at the other girl ­a mere pinkish, big-eyed girl whose name was Florrie ­who lingered stanchly by the new man and often kept him in talk when he should have been watchful.  Still this third girl had but little initiative.  She did insinuatingly ask Wilbur what his favourite flower was, but this got her nowhere, because it proved that he did not know.

The gentlemen across the net presently became unruly, and would play no more at a game which was merely intended, it seemed, to provide their opponents with talk of a coquettish character.  Wilbur ardently wished that Winona could have been there to hear this talk, because the peerless young things freely used the expletive “Darn!” after inept strokes.  Still they bored him.  He would rather have been on the links.

He confessed at last to his little court that he much preferred golf to tennis.  Patricia said that she had taken up golf, and that he must coach her over the Newbern course.  The dark-eyed girl at once said that she was about to take up golf, and would need even more coaching than Patricia.  Once they both searched him ­while the game waited ­for class pins, which they meant to appropriate.  They found him singularly devoid of these.  He never even knew definitely what they were looking for.

He was glad when refreshments were served on the lawn, and ate sandwiches in a wholehearted manner that disturbed Winona, who felt that at these affairs one should eat daintily, absently, as if elevated converse were the sole object and food but an incident.  Wilbur ate as if he were hungry ­had come there for food.  Even now he was not free from the annoying attentions of Patricia and her little friends.  They not only brought him other sandwiches and other cake and other lemonade, which he could have condoned, but they chattered so incessantly at him while he ate that only by an effort of concentration could he ignore them for the food.  Florrie said that he was brutal to women.  She was also heard to say ­Winona heard it ­that he was an awfully stunning chap.  Harvey D. Whipple was now a member of the party, beaming proudly upon his son.  And Sharon Whipple came presently to survey the group.  He winked at Wilbur, who winked in return.

After refreshments the young gentlemen withdrew to smoke.  They withdrew unostentatiously, through a pergola, round a clump of shrubbery, and on to the stables, where Merle revealed a silver cigarette case, from which he bestowed cigarettes upon them.  They lighted these and talked as men of the world.

“Those chickens make me sick,” said the little friend of Merle quite frankly.

“Me, too!” said Wilbur.

They talked of horses, Merle displaying his new thoroughbred in the box stall, and of dogs and motor boats; and Merle and the other boy spoke in a strange jargon of their prep school, where you could smoke if you had the consent of your parents.  Merle talked largely of his possessions and gay plans.

They were presently interrupted by the ladies, who, having withdrawn beyond the shrubbery clump to powder their noses from Florrie’s gold vanity box, had discovered the smokers, and now threatened to tell if the gentlemen did not instantly return.  So Merle’s little friend said wearily that they must go back to the women, he supposed.  And there was more tennis of a sort, more chatter.  As Mrs. Harvey D. said, everything moved off splendidly.

Winona, when they left, felt that her charge had produced a favourable impression, and was amazed that he professed to be unmoved by this circumstance, even after being told, as the noble car wheeled them homeward, what the girl, Florrie, had said of him; and that Mrs. Harvey D. Whipple had said she had always known he was a sweet boy.  He merely sniffed at the term and went on to disparage the little friends of Patricia.

“You told me not to say ‘darn,’” he protested, “but those girls all said it about every other word.”

“Not really?” said Winona, aghast.

“Darn this and darn that!  And darn that ball!  And darned old thing!” insisted the witness, imitatively.

“Oh, dear!” sighed Winona.

She wondered if Patricia could be getting in with a fast set.  She was further worried about Patricia, because Miss Murtree, over the ice cream, had confided to her that the girl was a brainless coquette; that her highest ambition, freely stated, was to have a black velvet evening gown, a black picture hat, and a rope of pearls.  Winona did not impart this item to Wilbur.  He was already too little impressed with the Whipple state.  Nor did she confide to him the singular remark of Sharon Whipple, delivered to her in hoarsely whispered confidence as Merle spoke at length to the group about his new horse.

“Ain’t he the most languageous critter!” had been Sharon’s words.

And Winona had thought Merle spoke so prettily and with such easy confidence.  Instead of regaling Wilbur with this gossip she insinuated his need for flannel trousers, sport shirts with rolling collars, tennis shoes of white.  She found him adamant in his resolve to buy no further clothes which could have but a spectacular value.

To no one that day, except to Wilbur Cowan himself, had it occurred that Merle Whipple’s birthday would also be the birthday of his twin brother.

Winona hoped that some trace of the day’s new elegance would survive into Wilbur’s professional life, but in this she suffered disappointment.  He refused to wear, save on state occasions, any of the beautiful new garments, and again went forth in the cap and dingy sneakers, the trousers without character, and the indeterminate sweater which would persist in looking soiled even after relentless washing.

Not even for golf with Patricia Whipple would he sound a higher note in apparel.  Patricia came to the course, accompanied by the dark girl, who said she was mad about golf, and over the eighteen holes each strove for his exclusive attention.  They bored him vastly.  He became mad about golf himself, because they talked noisily of other subjects and forgot his directions, especially the dark girl, who was mad about a great many things.  She proved to be a trial.  She was still so hopeless at the sport that at each shot she had to have her hands placed for her in the correct grip.  The other two were glad when she was called home, so that Patricia could enjoy the undivided attention of the coach.  The coach was glad, but only because his boredom was diminished by half; and Patricia, after two mornings alone with him, decided that she knew all of golf that was desirable.

The coach was too stubbornly businesslike; regarded her, she detected, merely as someone who had a lot to learn about the game.  And the going of her little friend had taken a zest from the pursuit of this determinedly golfing and unresponsive male.  He was relieved when she abandoned the sport and when he knew she had gone back to school.  Sometimes on the course when he watched her wild swings a trick of memory brought her back to him as the bony little girl in his own clothes ­she was still bony, though longer ­with her chopped-off hair and boyish swagger.  Then for a moment he would feel friendly, and smile at her in comradeship, but she always spoiled this when she spoke in her grand new manner of a grown-up lady.

Only Winona grieved when these golf sessions were no more.  She wondered if Patricia had not been shocked by some unguarded expression from Wilbur.  She had heard that speech becomes regrettably loose in the heat of this sport.  He sought to reassure her.

“I never said the least wrong thing,” he insisted.  “But she did, you bet!  ‘Darn’ and ‘gosh’ and everything like that, and you ought to have heard her once when she missed an easy putt.  She said worse than ‘darn!’ She blazed out and said ­”

“Don’t tell me!” protested shuddering Winona.  She wondered if Patricia’s people shouldn’t be warned.  She was now persuaded that golf endangered the morals of the young.  It had been bad enough when it seemed merely to encourage the wearing of nondescript clothes.  But if it led to language ?

Yet she was fated to discover that the world offered worse than golf, for Wilbur Cowan had not yet completed, in the process of his desultory education, the out-of-doors curriculum offered by even the little world of Newbern.  He was to take up an entirely new study, with the whole-hearted enthusiasm that had made him an adept at linotypes, gas engines, and the sport of kings.  Not yet, in Winona’s view, had he actually gone down into the depths of social obliquity; but she soon knew he had made the joyous descent.

The dreadful secret was revealed when he appeared for his supper one evening with a black eye.  That is, it would have been known technically as a black eye ­even Winona knew what to call it.  Actually it was an eye of many colours, shading delicately from pale yellow at the edge to richest variegated purple at the centre.  The eye itself ­it was the right ­was all but closed by the gorgeously puffed tissue surrounding it, and of no practical use to its owner.  The still capable left eye, instead of revealing concern for this ignominy, gleamed a lively pride in its overwhelming completeness.  The malign eye was worn proudly as a badge of honour, so proudly that the wearer, after Winona’s first outcry of horror, bubbled vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma by stepping into one of Spike Brennon’s straight lefts.  Nothing less than that!

Winona, conceiving that this talk was meant to describe an accident of the most innocent character, demanded further details; wishing to be told what a straight left was; why a person named Spike Brennon kept such things about; and how Wilbur had been so careless as to step into one.  She instinctively pictured a straight left to be something like an open door into which the victim had stepped in the dark.  Her enlightenment was appalling.  When the boy had zestfully pictured with pantomime of the most informing sort she not only knew what a straight left was, but she knew that Wilbur Cowan, in stepping into one ­in placing himself where by any chance he could step into one ­had flung off the ultimate restraint of decency.

It amounted to nothing less, she gathered, than that her charge had formed a sinister alliance with a degraded prize-fighter, a low bully who for hire and amid the foulest surroundings pandered to the basest instincts of his fellowmen by disgusting exhibitions of brute force.  As if that were not enough, this low creature had fallen lower in the social scale, if that were possible, by tending bar in the unspeakable den of Pegleg McCarron.  It was of no use for Wilbur to explain to her that his new hero chose this humble avocation because it afforded him leisure for training between his fights; that he didn’t drink or smoke, but kept himself in good condition; that it was a fine chance to learn how to box, because Spike needed sparring partners.

“Oh, it’s terrible!” cried Winona.  “A debased creature like that!”

“You ought to see him stripped!” rejoined the boy in quick pride.

This closed the interview.  Later she refused more than a swift glance of dismay at the photograph of the bully proudly displayed to her by the recipient.  With one eye widened in admiration, he thrust it without warning full into her gaze, whereupon she had gaspingly fled, not even noting the inscription of which the boy was especially proud:  “To my friend, Mr. Wilbur Cowan, from his friend, Eddie ­Spike ­Brennon, 133 lbs. ringside.”  It was a spirited likeness of the hero, though taken some years before, when he was in the prime of a ring career now, alas, tapering to obscurity.

Spike stood with the left shoulder slightly raised, the left foot advanced, the slightly bent left arm with its clenched fist suggestively extended.  His head was slanted to bring his chin down and in.  The right shoulder was depressed, and the praiseworthy right arm lay in watchful repose across his chest.  The tense gaze expressed absolute singleness of purpose ­a hostile purpose.  These details were lost upon Winona.  She had noted only that the creature’s costume consisted of the flags of the United States and Ireland tastefully combined to form a simple loin cloth.  Had she raised the boy for this?

The deplored intimacy had begun on a morning when Wilbur was early abroad salvaging golf balls from certain obscure nooks of the course where Newbern’s minor players were too likely to abandon the search for them on account of tall grass, snakes, poison ivy, and other deterrents.  Along the course at a brisk trot had come a sweatered figure, with cap pulled low, a man of lined and battered visage, who seemed to trot with a purpose, and yet with a purpose not to be discerned, for none pursued him and he appeared to pursue no one.

He had stopped amiably to chat with the boy.  He was sweating profusely, and chewed gum.  It may be said that he was not the proud young Spike Brennon of the photograph.  He was all of twenty-five, and his later years had told.  Where once had been the bridge of his nose was now a sharp indentation.  One ear was weirdly enlarged; and his mouth, though he spoke through narrowly opened lips, glittered in the morning sun with the sheen of purest gold.  Wilbur Cowan was instantly enmeshed by this new personality.

The runner wished to know what he was looking for.  Being told golf balls, he demanded “What for?” It seemed never to have occurred to him that there would be an object in looking for golf balls.  He curiously handled and weighed a ball in his brown and hairy hand.

“So that’s the little joker, is it?  I often seen ’em knockin’ up flies with it, but I ain’t never been close to one.  Say, that pill could hurt you if it come right!”

He was instructed briefly in the capacity of moving balls to inflict pain, and more particularly as to their market value.  As the boy talked the sweating man looked him over with shrewd, half-shut eyes.

“Ever had the gloves on, kid?” he demanded at last.

It appeared in a moment that he meant boxing gloves; not gloves in which to play golf.

“No, sir,” said Wilbur.

“You look good.  Come down to the store at three o’clock.  Mebbe you can give me a work-out.”

Quite astonishingly it appeared then that when he said the store he was meaning the low saloon of Pegleg McCarron; that he did road work every morning and wanted quick young lads to give him a work-out with the gloves in the afternoon, because even dubs was better than shadow boxing or just punching the bag all the time.  If they couldn’t box-fight they could wrestle.

So Wilbur had gone to the store that afternoon, and for many succeeding afternoons, to learn the fascinating new game in a shed that served McCarron as storeroom.  The new hero had here certain paraphernalia of his delightful calling ­a punching bag, small dumb-bells, a skipping rope, boxing gloves.  Here the neophyte had been taught the niceties of feint and guard and lead, of the right cross, the uppercut, the straight left, to duck, to side-step, to shift lightly on his feet, to stop protruding his jaw in cordial invitation, to keep his stomach covered.  He proved attentive and willing and quick.  He was soon chewing gum as Spike Brennon chewed it, and had his hair clipped in Brennon manner.  He lived his days and his nights in dreams of delivering or evading blows.  Often while dressing of a morning he would stop to punish an invisible opponent, doing an elaborate dance the while.  It was better than linotypes or motor busses.

In the early days of this new study he had been fearful of hurting Spike Brennon.  He felt that his blows were too powerful, especially that from the right fist when it should curve over Spike’s left shoulder to stop on his jaw.  But he learned that when his glove reached the right place Spike’s jaw had for some time not been there.  Spike scorned his efforts.

“Stop it, kid!  You might as well send me a pitcher postcard that it’s comin’.  You got to hit from where you are ­you can’t stop to draw back.  Use your left more.  G’wan now, mix it!  Mix it!”

They would mix it until the boy was panting.  Then while he sat on a beer keg until he should be in breath again the unwinded Spike would skip the rope ­a girl’s skipping rope ­or shadow-box about the room with intricate dance steps, raining quick blows upon a ghostly boxer who was invariably beaten; or with smaller gloves he would cause the inflated bag to play lively tunes upon the ceiling of its support.  After an hour of this, when both were sweating, they would go to a sheltered spot beyond the shed to play cold water upon each other’s soaped forms.

There had been six weeks of this before the boy’s dreadful secret was revealed to Winona; six weeks before he appeared to startle her with one eye radiating the rich hues of a ripened eggplant.  It had been simple enough.  He had seen his chance to step in and punish Spike, and he had stepped ­and Spike’s straight left had been there.

“You handed yourself that one, kid,” Spike had said, applying raw beef to it after their rubdown.

Wilbur had removed the beef after leaving the store.  He didn’t want the thing to go down too soon.  It was an honourable mark, wasn’t it?  Nothing to make the fuss about that Winona had made.  Of course you had to go to Pegleg McCarron’s to do the boxing, but Spike had warned him never to drink if he expected to get anywhere in this particular trade; not even to smoke.  That he had entirely abandoned the use of tobacco at Spike’s command should ­he considered ­have commended his hero to Winona’s favourable notice.  He wore the eye proudly in the public gaze; regretted its passing as it began to pale into merely rainbow tints.

But Winona took steps.  She was not going to see him die, perish morally, without an effort to save him.  She decided that Sharon Whipple would be the one to consult.  Sharon liked the boy ­had taken an interest in him.  Perhaps words in time from him might avert the calamity, especially after her father had refused to be concerned.

“Prize fighting!” said the judge, scornfully.  “What’ll he be doing next?  Never settles down to anything.  Jack-of-all-trades and good at none.”

It was no use hoping for help from a man who thought fighting was foolish for the boy merely because he would not earnestly apply himself to it.

She went to Sharon Whipple, and Sharon listened even more sympathetically than she had hoped he would.  He seemed genuinely shocked that such things had been secretly going on in the life of his young friend.  He clicked deprecatingly with his tongue as Winona became detailed in her narrative.

“My great glory!” he exclaimed at last.  “You mean to say they mix it down there every afternoon?”

“Every single day,” confirmed Winona.  “He’s been going to that low dive for weeks and weeks.  Think of the debasing associations!”

“Just think of it!” said Sharon, impatiently.  “Every afternoon ­and me not hearing a word of it!”

“If you could only say a word to him,” besought Winona.  “Coming from you it might have an influence for good.”

“I will, I will!” promised Sharon, fervently, and there was a gleam of honest determination in his quick old eyes.

That very afternoon, in Pegleg McCarron’s shed, he said words to Wilbur that might have an influence for good.

“Quit sticking your jaw out that way or he’ll knock it off!” had been his first advice.  And again:  “Cover up that stomach ­you want to get killed?” He was sitting at one end of the arena, on a plank supported by the ends of two beer kegs, and he held open a large, thick, respectable gold watch.  “Time!” he called.

Beside him sat the red-eyed and disreputable Pegleg McCarron, who whacked the floor with the end of his crutch from time to time in testimony of his low pleasure.

The round closed with one of Wilbur Cowan’s right crosses ­started from not too far back ­landing upon the jaw of Spike Brennon with what seemed to be a shattering impact.  Sharon Whipple yelled and Pegleg McCarron pounded the floor in applause.  Spike merely shook his head once.

“The kid’s showing speed,” he admitted, cordially.  “If he just had something back of them punches!”

“It was a daisy!” exclaimed Sharon.  “My suffering stars, what a daisy!”

“’Twas neatly placed!” said Pegleg.

“I’m surprised at you!” said Sharon later to the panting apprentice.  “I’m surprised and grieved!  You boys mixing it here every day for weeks and never letting on!”

“I never thought you’d like it,” said Wilbur.

“Like it!” said Sharon.  He said it unctuously.  “And say, don’t you let on to Miss Penniman that I set here and held the watch for you.  I ain’t wanting that to get out on me.”

“No, sir,” said Wilbur.

Later Sharon tried to avoid Winona one day on River Street, but when he saw that she would not be avoided he met her like a man.

“I’ve reasoned with the boy from time to time,” he confessed, gloomily, “but he’s self-headed, talking huge high about being a good lightweight and all that.  I don’t know ­mebbe I haven’t taken just the right tack with him yet.”

Winona thought him curiously evasive in manner.  She believed that he feared the worst for the boy, but was concealing it from her.

“His eye is almost well where that cowardly bully struck him,” she told Sharon.  “If only we could get him into something where he could hold his head up.”

“He does that too much now,” began Sharon, impulsively, but stopped, floundering.  “I mean he ain’t enough ashamed,” he concluded feebly, and feigned that someone had called him imperatively from the door of the First National Bank.

From time to time Spike’s boxing manner grew tense for a period of days.  He tightened up, as Sharon put it, and left a sore and battered apprentice while he went off to some distant larger town to fight, stepping nonchalantly aboard the six-fifty-eight with his fighting trunks and shoes wrapped in a copy of the Newbern Advance, and shifting his gum as he said good-bye to Wilbur, who would come down to see him off.

Sometimes Spike returned from these sorties unscathed and with money.  Oftener he came back without money and with a face ­from abrasive thrusts ­looking as if a careless golfer had gone over him and neglected to replace the divots.  After these times there were likely to follow complicated episodes of dentistry at the office of Doctor Patten.  These would render the invincible smile of Spike more refulgent than ever.

The next birthday of Merle Whipple was celebrated at a time when Spike had been particularly painstaking in view of an approaching combat.  Not only did he leave his young friend with an eye that compelled the notice, an eye lavishly displaying all the tints yet revealed by spectroscopic analysis, and which by itself would have rendered him socially undesirable, but he bore a swollen nose and a split and puffy lip; bore them proudly, it should be said, and was not enough cast down, in Winona’s opinion, that his shameful wounds would deter him from mingling with decent folk.  Indeed, Winona had to be outspoken before she convinced him that a birthday party was now no place for him.  He would have gone without misgiving, and would have pridefully recounted the sickening details of that last round in which Spike Brennon had permitted himself to fancy he faced a veritable antagonist.  Still he cared little for the festivity.

He saw Patricia from a distance in River Street, but pulled the dingy cap lower and avoided her notice.  She was still bony and animated and looked quite capable of commanding his attendance over eighteen holes of the most utterly futile golf in all the world.  His only real regret in the matter of his facial blemishes was that Spike came back with the mere loser’s end of an inconsiderable purse, and had to suffer another infliction of the most intricate bridge work at the hands of Doctor Patten before he could properly enjoy at the board of T-bone Tommy that diet so essential to active men of affairs.