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squandering, Sun-libertine am I, A-wandering, a-wandering, Until the day I

die.

And then he stood for minutes drinking in deep breaths of the pure, sweet air of

the new day. Beside him, a head taller, savagely strong, stood Billy Byrne, his

broad shoulders squared, his great chest expanding as he inhaled.

"It's great, ain't it?" he said, at last. "I never knew the country was like this, an' I

don't know that I ever would have known it if it hadn't been for those poet guys

you're always spouting.

I always had an idea they was sissy fellows," he went on; "but a guy can't be a

sissy an' think the thoughts they musta thought to write stuff that sends the

blood chasin' through a feller like he'd had a drink on an empty stomach.

I used to think everybody was a sissy who wasn't a tough guy. I was a tough guy

all right, an' I was mighty proud of it. I ain't any more an' haven't been for a long

time; but before I took a tumble to myself I'd have hated you, Bridge. I'd a-hated

your fine talk, an' your poetry, an' the thing about you that makes you hate to

touch a guy for a hand-out.

"I'd a-hated myself if I'd thought that I could ever talk mushy like I am now. Gee,

Bridge, but I was the limit! A girl--a nice girl--called me a mucker once, an' a

coward. I was both; but I had the reputation of bein' the toughest guy on the

West Side, an' I thought I was a man. I nearly poked her face for her--think of it,

Bridge! I nearly did; but something stopped me--something held my hand from it,

an' lately I've liked to think that maybe what stopped me was something in me

that had always been there--something decent that was really a part of me. I hate

to think that I was such a beast at heart as I acted like all my life up to that

minute. I began to change then. It was mighty slow, an' I'm still a roughneck; but

I'm gettin' on. She helped me most, of course, an' now you're helpin' me a lot, too-

-you an' your poetry stuff. If some dick don't get me I may get to be a human bein'

before I die."

Bridge laughed.

"It IS odd," he said, "how our viewpoints change with changed environment and

the passing of the years. Time was, Billy, when I'd have hated you as much as

you would have hated me. I don't know that I should have said hate, for that is

not exactly the word. It was more contempt that I felt for men whom I considered

as not belonging upon that intellectual or social plane to which I considered I had

been born.

176

The Mucker