Fighting Blood

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Fighting Blood

By H. C. Witwer Author of "The Leather Pushers," etc.

❦

A Punch—And Judy

I remember the first look I took at the cubbyhole on the top floor just about wound matters up. The walls is papered terrible red, or maybe this rabbit hutch kind of blushed when the landlady called it a room. A faded rag carpet on the floor, a white-enameled cot like you get in the hospital, a chair not even fit to use as a weapon, a bureau which I bet come off the Ark, a picture of Theodore Roosevelt with the compliments of the New York "Blade," a cartoon of a vase of roses in a gilt frame, a window with a wide crack in the upper pane of glass—or else it was grinning at me: "Not so good, eh?"

Still, everything is as clean and neat as a new pin. But I can't sleep in a new pin. I'm looking for a out, when Mrs. Willcox, the kind of silvery-haired, sweet-faced old lady your grandmother was or is, takes things in hand.

"This here's seven and a half dollars a week with board—ahump—in advance," she says, and looks at me. I guess she must of heard me gulping. I had eight dollars, even. "What did you say your name was?" she adds.

I ain't said nothing about my name, but I did now. "Gale Galen."

"Plannin' on stayin' in Drew City for a spell?" is the next question.

"That's up to Drew City," I says, telling the truth. "I2"

"What sort of business you in, Mister Galen?" she cuts me off.

The "Mister" tickled me. Why shouldn't it at seventeen? I bet the first time you was called "Mister" it tickled you too.

"The business I'm in right now, Mrs. Willcox," I says, "is looking for a job."

"Ahump!" says Mrs. Willcox, plenty suspicious.

I leave her to be that way, for the reasons that I have already made up my mind that I don't want no part of that two-by-four room for seven and a half or for nothing at all a week. Even if I am a poor fish, I am no sardine. I like plenty of parking space. So I kind of moved to the door.

"I don't think I want to take—eh—" I begin.

A door slams open downstairs with a bang, feet comes pattering up the two flights, a voice that made me snap out of it with a click calls: "Oh, mother!" and a minute later a million dollars' worth of girl yanks open the door, sees me, says, "Oh, I beg your pardon!" and blushes into two million dollars' worth of girl.

"Land sakes, Judy, can't you ever come into the house 'thout bangin' the doors off?" says Mrs. Willcox, kind of peeved. Judy shakes a head of hair that must of enraged a lot of her girl friends and shows me all her nice white teeth. Me? I'm double cuckoo! I don't know what it's all about till Mrs. Willcox coughs and it wasn't from no cold. I reached in my pocket and handed over all but four bits of my bank roll.

"I'll take the room, Mrs. Willcox," I says, pushing the money into her hand. "Eh—I want to see some people here and—eh—what time is supper?"

"Dinner," says Judy, her eyes twinkling at me, "is at seven."

"I generally always exchange references," says Mrs. Willcox, looking at Judy and frowning a bit. "And2"

"That's all right," I says from out in the hall. "You don't need to give me no references, Mrs. Willcox!" and then, before she could say some more, I took the air. I had to get a job. Less than a hour later I landed one as soda jerker in Ajariah Stubbs' "Cash Beats Credit!" drug store. Seven a.m. to 9.30 p.m. and very few laughs.

That was six years ago and maybe you think that's a lot of memorandum about nothing at all to remember that long. You wouldn't think so if you could of seen Judy—that's Judith Willcox. It ain't the slightest trouble for me to remember every detail in any ways connected with me meeting her. I'll remember that right up to the time they send for the embalmer! Yet I'm no memory shark. I forget plenty things, as some of my many ex-bosses could tell you. They should—they told me. But certain things kind of stand out, things that I don't have to look back to, they're always as fresh and clear down to the smallest detail as if they happened yesterday. Like these—the time Dewey got rid of the Spanish navy at Manila Bay and I got rid of armfuls of special extras on a street corner in Boston, when I should of been in public school instead of being a studious pupil of nine summers in the School of Experience . . . the time. I fell off a dock into the harbor at the mellow age of eleven and find out I can't swim . . . a operation for appendicitis . . . the pay envelope from my first job . . . the first time I seen Judy Willcox . . . but that's enough to give you a idea of what kind of things sticks in my mind. I remember Dewey's sensational win because I get a nickel apiece that morning for penny papers, the flop into the harbor for the reasons that a cop pulled me out and gets both our pictures in the paper, the operation because I didn't have appendicitis, the pay envelope because I lose it, and the first time I seen Judy Willcox because she knocks me so dizzy I rush out of her mother's boarding house without any hat and had to buy another one with my last half dollar, on the account I'm afraid I can't get a job bareheaded.

Well, anyways, after a year I'm still on the wrong side of the counter, mixing a mean ice cream soda and shaking a wicked egg phosphate for old Ajariah Stubbs. I was clicking off twelve bucks the week and I had plenty responsibilities—I deliver in a flivver, prescriptions and ice cream. But I'd made up my mind I wasn't going to spend the rest of my life behind no soda fountain. I didn't do all my dreaming at night and I was determined that some day I was going to mean something.

What brings me to Drew City, in the first place, is the Jersey Central Railroad and a desire to see Jack Reynolds, which jerks soda with me in Boston before he goes back to his home town, this village thirty-eight miles from New York where even the circus only stops for a day. Jack's real trade is being a advance agent for carnivals, and between seasons why, he puts on a white coat and apron and slings soda.

You'd be surprised at some of the fellows you run across in the soda-dispensing game. While I was in it, I worked side by side with actors, chorus men, song writers, press agents, scrappers, fellows working their ways through college, ex-bartenders, etc and etc., ail, except the ex-bartenders, waiting for something to turn up in their own line. You know in the big towns a first-class soda jerk can knock off eighteen to twenty bucks a week and a good head soda man which can also mix syrups can ask and get twenty-five to thirty. Plenty of milk-fed private secretaries and law clerks gets far less.

Aside from the fly-by-nights, which only goes behind a fountain while waiting for a chance to do their real trick, there's thousands of fellows has made a first-class trade out of jerking soda. And to get the important money you got to know a whole lot more about the calling than just being able to put on a white coat and apron and saying: "Get your checks from the cashier, please!" Oh, my, yes! If you don't think so, try and get a job on a first-class fountain in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, and hamlets of that size. You get put through a examination that would make Edison's foolish questions sound like a kindergarten test and you got to be well heeled with references, don't think you don't.

You can tell a big league head soda jerk by the way he picks up a glass, but the acid test is what kind of chocolate syrup he can make in the summer and what kind of tomato bouillon he can throw together in the winter when hot drinks gets the call at the fountain. Plenty flavors can be bought in bulk, but no first-class fountain buys tailor-made chocolate. The most popular flavor of 'em all is always made personally by the head soda man and he takes as much pride in his chocolate as Dempsey does in his right hook. He says it with chocolate and he composes a mean syrup. You bother him when he's making up a batch and good-bye job! Fountains is made or broke amongst soda jerks by their chocolate syrup and making it right is a sure enough gift.

Well, when I get to Drew City, Jack Reynolds has gone away a week before with some carnival, so my chances of busting head first into the theatrical business is all shot to pieces. I ain't got enough jack to get back to Boston, and New York frightens me in the short view I get of it changing trains. I don't even know a street address there and it looks so big and cold-hearted—everything and everybody rushing and tearing along with a kind of wild, worried look on their faces—well, it scares me stiff, no fooling! Then, like I said, along comes Judy Willcox, and I hang my hat up in Drew City and call it home.

At first I don't make the headway with Judy that I'd like to, and that's a fact. She was sixteen when I hit Drew City and on her seventeenth birthday I gave her a gold-banded fountain pen with her initials on it. Judy got a total of nine presents for that birthday. Five of 'em was gold-banded fountain pens and I wish now I had gave her my present in cash and she could of got something she really needed—probably fountain pen ink.

Anyways I made myself a lot of friends among the fellows and girls that went to Drew City Prep and come in the drug store every afternoon for their sodas and sundaes. I went to work and invented a drink called Drew City Surprise, and the gang went crazy about it. It had everything in it but the kitchen stove and we got twenty cents a copy for it. I had a terrible battle with the boss the first time I paste up the sign on the mirror back of the fountain. He claims they ain't nobody living will pay twenty cents for no soda fountain drink, unless I put a dime in each and every glass, but I says if I can get them to try a Drew City Surprise they will pay twenty cents or even more for it, for the reasons that it's something new and a bit different from plain ordinary soda fountain drinks. Then again, the high price will make 'em think it must be good and the fellows will want to show off in front of their girls so they'll order it.

Well, I am right and old Ajariah smiles for about the first time since he found a dollar bill wedged under the cash-register drawer when he bought the store. He says I ought to be a salesman, and maybe next year he'll put me on the drug counter, where the patent medicines and the 85 per cent profits is. But I can't get him to try a "Drew City Surprise" himself, because he says he has watched me and I never make it the same way twice and that's a fact, for I forget how I make it the first time. Still and all, they's no complaints from nobody, so why worry?

After you leave Drew City Prep you go either to Princeton or to work, according to how is things with your people. But outside of Judy Willcox, most of the gang that come in the drug store belongs to families as rich as a custard, and they all go to some swell college the same as their fathers and mothers done before them, just like I went to work the same day as my fathers and mothers done before me. The routine is a little different on the account everybody is equal at birth when it don't mean nothing, but if they was all equal at around seventeen, why, it would mean plenty! In that case I would of been going to this Drew City Prep and getting my three squares a day, too, instead of jerking soda for Ajariah Stubbs so's in the order to eat and depending on what I can remember of this and that to get a education.

Among the first friends I make in Drew City is Rutledge Spencer-Brock, a regular guy even if his name does sound like two collars and a Pullman car. His old man is down to his last twenty million, and some day Spence will be left about everything but Niagara Falls and South Dakota, but he don't put on no dog with me in spite of that. He's about as old as me, but taller and thinner and one swell-looking fellow. Most of these flappers was just wild about him, and why shouldn't they be wild over a baby like that, which can't miss being a millionaire and just about owns this Drew City Prep? He was pitcher on the baseball team, quarter-back and captain of the football team, and the same week I arrived in Drew City he goes to work and takes over the interscholastic record for the dash of 440 yards. Likewise, he's a dancing fool and throats a cruel tenor—which makes him about perfect from the girls' standpoint, hey?

Anyhow, me and Spence gets along like the Two Orphans. He had a elegant racing car, and we burn up the State road to Trenton in that sweet running boat many's the time. We go duck shooting and fishing and like that together and the first Sunday I was off we both sneaked over to New York and went to this Coney Island. Some joint! We ride on everything in the place from the merry-go-round to the shoot-the-shoots and act like a pair of ten-year-old kids in the toy department the week before Xmas. Some of the things, like the roller coaster and the Dizzy Dip, why, we stay on a dozen times. I had eleven bucks saved up for a suit and that lasted about as long as a leaf of cabbage would last at a rabbits' convention. Money and me is easy separated, and that's a fact! While Spence is in a cigar store phoning his mother where he is, I blowed two of the last three of my eleven bucks taking a bunch of dirty-faced kids around on the scenic railway. Them kids is hanging around watching it like it is a ham bone and they are all collies, and every now and then they get chased away by the guy running the thing.

Well, after a while I can't stand looking at them, so I took the whole mob for a ride and be done with it!

When Spence came out of the cigar store he bets me five bucks he can wallop a punching-bag machine harder than I can. So he hauls off and hits this bag and the dial registers 1,150. Then I stepped back and slammed it as hard as I could and the arrow points to 2,025, and Spence says the machine must be out of order. So we punch it again and this time Spence hits 1,475 and hurts his hand and I hit 2,625 and hurt his bank roll, as he immediately hands over the five bucks with a grin, remarking that he would hate to get into a fight with me. Well, I wouldn't get in no fight with him no matter what he done, because he is aces with me. But I would fight for Spence in a minute, don't think I wouldn't!

But to get to the point, I guess I will always look back on the next day as one of the most exciting days I ever had in my life. It's a big day for Drew City likewise, because Knockout Kelly, the , comes down there the day before to train for his fight with Jackie Frayne in New York. The bunch stops in on their ways to school the following morning and all the fellows is talking about going out in the afternoon to Knockout Kelly's camp and watch him do his stuff.

Spence begs me to come out with him, so I ask old Ajariah can I have the day off and I won't take my regular day next week. But they is nothing stirring! Ajariah says he can't let me get away on the account he's going out to look at a sheriff's sale. Where he went was out to Knockout Kelly's training camp, because Spence seen him there and told me.

Why Ajariah Stubbs should be so keen about boxing I don't know, unless it's because he's about fifteen years older than the Rocky Mountains and will soon be meeting the busiest boxer of 'em all—the undertaker.

Well, Judy Willcox comes in with the rest of the gang that day and gives me a smile which cost Ajariah Stubbs exactly three cents because I drop a glass as the result. Judy has just went to work and had her hair bobbed off, and she asks me how do I like it, taking off her hat and flopping the hair around to show me. But whenever I see her face, why, that's all I can look at, and she could of had a basket of eggs on her head and I wouldn't of knew it. I'm looking into the bluest and shineyest eyes I ever seen or want to and I'm kind of trembling like I done when I first seen her, and like I always do when I see her since. Then a nasty voice says:

"Come on, snap out of it—do your sleeping at night! Two orange phosphates."

This is a guy called Maurice Dempster, and he's carrying Judy's books for her, the big stiff! His old man owned the carpet factory here, which seems to make this fathead think he's the duck's quack. We like each other the same way a rat loves a ferret and the fact that he's stuck on Judy don't make me want to kiss him every time I run across him either. I don't know how Judy could ever see this baby, with his fat face and beady little eyes, which is still beady even when he laughs.

"Oh, don't be so cranky, Rags, you're like an old bear!" says Judy, and she don't seem to like this dumbbell hollering at me. "Besides I don't want an orange phosphate, I want a chocolate fudge sundae."

"I should say not!" says Rags, like he's her father. They call him "Rags" on the account of his old man's carpet mill. "I should say not! It's too soon after your breakfast. Hurry up with those phosphates, will you?"

"Be yourself and quit that hollering!" I says, laying a chocolate fudge sundae and a exceedingly bitter orange phosphate down in front of 'em.

"Can't you understand English?" snorts Rags, "I didn't order a sundae, I said two2"

"Well, I ordered a sundae," butts in Judy, dipping her spoon in this rich goo and rolling her eyes up at the ceiling. "This is perfectly heavenly!" she says. So is she!

Rags gets red in the face and Judy catches him in the mirror back of the fountain and she winks and laughs. Acting like he's worried about something, Rags gives me a horrible look.

"Thirty cents, please!" I says to him.

He begins going through his pockets and his face is now the color of a ripe tomato. "I—eh—I've only got—I find I have only twenty cents with me," he stutters, glaring at me. "That would have been enough for the two orange phosphates I ordered. I don't see why I should have to pay for your stupidity—you misunderstood my order and2"

Judy laughs and opens her purse.

"Oh, I'll pay for my own luxuries," she says, slapping a dime on the counter besides Rags's two. Just to make Rags feel bad, I rung it up. Imagine a guy with a carpet mill in his family taking a girl in a drug store for a drink and then having to borrow the money from her to pay the bill!

Rags is fit to be tied and he gulps down his phosphate and jumps off the stool. His face is all screwed up in a knot and I don't blame him, as I put plenty phosphate into his glass! Then he growls at Judy to hurry up or they'll be late.

"I'm going to report you to Mr. Stubbs!" he snarls at me.

"Do that!" I says politely, polishing up back of the fountain.

"If you do any such thing, Rags," says Judy, very cold, getting up and wiping her wonderful lips with the paper napkin I give her—"if you do any such thing, I'll have nothing further to do with you!"

"Laugh that off!" I says to Rags—and make a enemy for life.

Judy comes in by herself again after school in the afternoon and they ain't nobody in the store but me. The boys is all out at Knockout Kelly's camp, and the girls is busy getting their costumes ready for a masquerade that Stella Armitage, Spence's girl friend, is giving the next night. Judy orders up a chocolate fudge sundae, and while I am going out of my way to make this the greatest sundae ever placed in a dish, I happen to look at her books which she has laid on the counter. Most of 'em is Latin, Greek, and French and I am thinking I only wish I had a chance to study them languages and maybe get away from the soda business and not be no dumbbell all my life.

But I am having plenty trouble with the English language then, as far as that part of it goes! That's what gets me sore when I think things over, like I do now and then when I ain't thinking of Judy and how much chocolate syrup I got on hand and will I ever get any more than twelve bucks a week. I think suppose I did get a crack at a job with some kind of a future in it right then—what good would that do me when, as far as education is concerned, I don't know what it's all about?

They must be something I can do which will get me further than jerking soda will, I think, but how am I ever going to find out what that something is, with the schooling I got? They may be a big league lawyer, or a first class doctor, or a world beating business man in me somewheres, but how can I bring that out when I have got to stick back of this fountain or else see how long can I fast? There ought to be some way of guys like me getting a crack at things. I bet there's lots of rich fellows in college which don't give a dam what they do after their four years is up. Well I'd of give a leg for even one year at college and I bet when I come out I'd of did a whole lot more than just go to the annual football games, and that's a fact! Anyway I slapped a dollar's worth of whipped cream on the top of this chocolate fudge sundae and put it in front of Judy, and then I notice she's watching me, with a queer look on her pretty face.

"Gale," she says, "do you ever think about your future?"

Now, ain't that funny, when that's just what I been thinking about?

"Sure!" I says. "I think my future is all behind me."

"No—I'm serious," says Judy. "And this whipped cream is delicious! What did you do before you came to Drew City, or is that too personal?"

"Not at all, Judy," I says. "It ain't often I get a chance to—well, get this kind of stuff off my chest. They is nothing very exciting in my life's history, so far. I was born of poor but American parents and I begin earning my keep at about eight—in the morning and of age. I've sold papers, split bobbins in a cotton mill, been a errand boy, printer's devil, and took out orders for a butcher—that being about the only time I actually delivered the goods!"

"But when did you go to school?" asks Judy.

"Before I got into the newspaper business—selling 'em," I says.

"And that was when you were only eight years old?" she asks, and her eyes gets wider.

I nods.

"Well," says Judy, very severe, "I think you must have been a very, very bad little boy to stay away from school just to sell newspapers for a few pennies!"

"Judy," I says, "I would of been a very, very thin little boy if I hadn't of stayed away from school to sell newspapers. We got so crazy about food in our family that we just had to have some every day or we wouldn't play!"

Judy stops eating that swell sundae and gives me a long look. Then she nods her head and sighs.

"I—I understand, now," she says, kind of soft. "Oh—that's criminal!"

"Well, Judy," I says, "they's plenty fellows like me, as far as that part of it goes. And then, again, somebody has got to be soda jerkers, I guess—eh—" I am trying to laugh matters off.

"Surely, Gale, you don't expect to be a soda clerk all your life?" she cuts in on me. The sundae is melting away.

"No, Judy, I don't!" I says slowly, sitting on the ice-cream tank back of the counter. "For one thing, I'd have a hard time shaking up malted milks when I got to be eighty-five, and for another thing, Judy, I'm going to get somewhere! Right now I ain't got no more idea than a baby of what I'm going to be. I'm busy now living . . . some job for us guys. But I ain't going to just sit back and moan because I fail to get born in a mint, like Rags Dempster and that bunch. I got too much fighting blood in me to moan, Judy! I'm going to get me a education. I'm going to get that by hook or crook! I got to get some trick which will keep me alive while I'm plowing through books like you got there and trying to understand what they mean. Say—yesterday they was a lot of them rich guys from the golf club in here and they're talking about the new locker room they're putting in. Each one of them babies is socked for a thousand apiece—nothing at all to them. Why, I'd live a year on a thousand bucks, and I could go to some snappy school like you do, too! Well, I'll get the thousand, or2"

"Honestly, of course!" butts in Judy, as serious as if she's forty instead of seventeen. But then girls is always older than their actual age, ain't they?

"Do I look crooked?" I grins.

Judy laughs and shakes her head. "Well, I must go," she says. "This has been awfully interesting, hasn't it?" Then, like she just thought of it, she says: "Oh—you know that Stella Armitage's masquerade dance is to-morrow night?"

"I hear them all talking about it—yes," I says, kind of surprised. "But what does that mean to me?"

This is one of the very few times I ever see Judy act timid and shy.

"Well—well, the girls are to choose their own escorts and2"

"And you're going with Rags Dempster!" I finishes for her, kicking a empty fruit can the length of the fountain.

"I am not!" says Judy, straightening her hat in the mirror. "I'm going with you! Are these caramels fresh?"

What do I care about caramels? I am around the counter in a jump!

"Is that level—you mean that, Judy?" I holler.

"Of course!" laughs Judy, moving to the door. "You mustn't get so excited. I'm going to be an Oriental dancer, but don't tell any of the crowd if they come in here to-day. What are you going to be?"

"I think I'll go as a soda dispenser!" I says, still in a trance from her asking me at all. "Or else I'll empty a bowl of whipped cream on my head and pretend I'm a nut sundae. I—eh—don't worry about that part of it, Judy, I'll dig up some kind of a layout. But, say, listen—are you just asking me to go with you so's to steam Rags Dempster up?"

"If you think so, don't come!" snaps Judy. Then she's laughing at me again. "However, Mr. Gale Galen, if you decide that you can condescend to accompany me, we should be at Stella's about half past eight."

"But listen, Judy, you2"

A wave of her hand, a slammed door and she's gone. It's just Ajariah Stubbs's drug store again and I am just a soda jerk. Both me and the store seemed something entirely different when she was in there!