"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 a.n.a.lysis, 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.

CHAPTER XII

Once more the aging Wilbur Cowan stood alone by night thrillingly to watch the arched splendour of stars above and muse upon the fleeting years that carried off his youth. The moment marked another tremendous epoch, for he was done with school. Now for all the years to come he could hear the bell sound its warning and feel no qualm; never again need sit confined in a stuffy room, breathing chalk dust, and compel his errant mind to bookish abstractions. He had graduated from the Newbern High School, respectably if not with distinguished honour, and the superintendent had said, in conferring his rolled and neatly tied diploma, that he was facing the battle of life and must acquit himself with credit to Newbern.

The superintendent had seemed to believe it was a great moment; there had been a tremor in his voice as he addressed the cla.s.s, each in turn.

He was a small, nervous, intent man whose daily worries showed plainly through the uplift of the moment, and Wilbur had wondered what he found to be so thrilled about. His own battle with life--he must have gone out to the fight years ago under much the same circ.u.mstances--had apparently brought him none of the glory he was now urging his young charges to strive for. He had to stay in a schoolroom and breathe chalk dust.

Whatever the battle of life might be, he was going to fight it out-of-doors; not like imprisoned school-teachers and clerks and bookkeepers in First National banks. Only when alone under that splatter of stars did he feel the moment big with more than a mere release from textbooks. Then at last he knew that he had become a man and must put away childish things, and his mind floated on the thought, off to those distant stars where other boys had that night, perhaps unwittingly, become men.

He wished that people would not pester him with solemn questions about what he now meant to make of himself. They seemed to believe that he should be concerned about this. Winona was especially insistent. She said he stood at the parting of the ways; that all his future hung upon his making a seemly choice; and she said it gloomily, with frank foreboding, as one more than half expecting him to choose amiss.

Judge Penniman was another who warned him heavily that it was time to quit being a Jack-of-all-trades. The judge spoke as from a topless tower of achievement, relating anecdotes of his own persistence under difficulties at the beginning of a career which he allowed his hearer to infer had been of shining merit, hampered, it is true, by the most trying ill health. Even Mrs. Penniman said that they were expecting great things of him, now that he had become a man.

The boy dimly felt that there was something false in all this urgency.

The superintendent of schools and Winona and the judge and Mrs. Penniman seemed to be tightly wound up with expectancy about him, yet lived their own lives not too tensely. The superintendent of schools was not inspiring as a model; the judge, for all his talk, lived a life of fat idleness, with convenient maladies when the Penniman lawn needed mowing.

Mrs. Penniman, it is true, fought the battle of life steadily with her plain and fancy dressmaking, but with no visible glory; and Winona herself was becoming a drab, sedate spinster, troubled about many things. He wondered why they should all conceive him to be meant for so much more than they had achieved. Why couldn't he relax into a life such as they led, without all this talk of effort and planning? It seemed to him that people pretty much allowed life to make itself for them, and lived it as it came. He was not going to bother about it. Let it come.

He would find a way to live it. People managed. Judge Penniman was never so ailing that he couldn't reach the harness shop for his game of checkers. The only person he knew who had really worked hard to make something of himself was Spike Brennon.

So he resorted to the golf links that summer, heedless and happy.

"Without ideals so far as one can read him," wrote Winona in her journal, underlining the indictment and closing it with three bold exclamation points. He was welcomed effusively to the golf course by John Knox McTavish.

"Good!" said John on the morning of his appearance, which was effusive for any McTavish.

He liked the boy, not only because he drove a sweet ball, but because you could talk to him in a way you couldn't to par-r-r-rties you was teaching to hold a club proper-r-r-r and to quit callin' it a stick.

He caddied that summer only for golfers of the better sort, and for Sharon Whipple, choosing his employ with nice discrimination. John had said golf was a grand game, because more than any other game it showed how many kinds of fool a man could be betwixt his mind and his muscles.

His apprentice was already sensitive to the grosser kinds. In addition to caddying he taught the secrets of the game when pupils came too plenteously for John. But he lacked John's tried patience, and for the ideal teacher was too likely to utter brutal truths instead of polite and meandering diplomacies. He had caught perhaps a bit too much of Spike Brennon's manner of instruction, a certain strained brusquerie, out of pace with people who are willing to pay largely for instruction which they ignore in spite of its monotonous repet.i.tion. John warned him that he must soften his clients--b.u.t.ter-r-r 'em up with nice words--or they wouldn't come back. He must say they was doing gr-r-rand. He did say it now and then, but with no ring of conviction.

Still it was a good summer. Especially good, because all the time he knew he was waiting for that morning in early September when the school bell would ring and he would laugh carelessly at what had once been the imperious summons. He thought that after this high moment he might be able to plan his life at least a little--not too minutely.

Late that summer Merle and Patricia Whipple came by appointment to play the course with him. Merle, too, had become a man--he would enter college that fall. Apparently no one was bothering about the plan of his life. And Patricia had become, if not a woman, at least less of a girl, though she was still bony and utterly freckled. They drove off, Patricia not far but straight, and Merle, after impressive preliminaries that should have intimidated any golf ball, far but not straight. After his shot he lectured instructively upon its faults. When he had done they knew why he had sliced into the miry fen on the right. Then with an expert eye he studied his brother's stance and swing. The ball of Wilbur went low and straight and far, but the shot was prefaced, apparently, by no nice adjustment of the feet or by any preliminary waggles of the club.

"No form," said Merle. "You ought to have form by this time, but you don't show any; and you put no force into your swing. Now let me show you just one little thing about your stance."

With generous enthusiasm he showed his brother not only one little thing, but two or three that should be a buckler to him in time of need; and his brother thanked him, and so authoritative was the platform manner of Merle that he nearly said "Yes, sir." After which Patricia played a bra.s.sy shot, and they all went to find Merle's ball among the oaks. After that they went on to Wilbur's ball, which--still without a trace of form--he dropped on the green with a mashie, in spite of Merle's warning that he would need a mid-iron to reach it.

They drove, and again Merle lectured upon the three reasons why his ball came to rest in a sand trap that flanked the fairway. He seemed to feel this information was expected from him, nor did he neglect a generous exposition of his brother's failure to exhibit form commensurate with his far, straight drive. His brother was this time less effusive in his thanks, and in no danger whatever of replying "Yes, sir!" He merely retorted, "Don't lunge--keep down!" advice which the lecturer received with a frowning, "I know--I know!" as if he had lunged intentionally, with a secret purpose that would some day become known, to the confusion of so-called golf experts. Wilbur and Patricia waited while Merle went to retrieve his ball. They saw repeated sand showers rise over the top of a bunker. From where they stood the player seemed to be inventing a new kind of golf, to be played without a ball. A pale mist hung over the scene.

"I know just what he's saying," Patricia told Wilbur.

"Shame on you!" said he, and they both laughed, after which Patricia glanced at him oftener.

It should be said that he was now arrayed as Winona would have him, in summer sports attire of careless but expensive appearance, including a silk shirt alleged by the maker to be snappy, and a cap of real character. The instinct of the male for noticeable plumage had at last worked the reform that not all of Winona's pleading had sufficed for.

Wilbur Cowan at the moment might, but for his excellent golf, have been mistaken for a genuine Whipple.

Merle's homilies continued after each shot. He subjected his own drives to a masterly a.n.a.lysis, and strove to incite his brother to correct form, ill.u.s.trating this for his instruction with practice swings that were marvels of nicety, and learnedly quoting Braid and Vardon.

It was after one of these informative intervals, succeeding a brilliantly topped drive by the lecturer, that Patricia Whipple, full in the flooding current of Merle's discourse, turned her speckled face aside and flagrantly winked a greenish eye at Wilbur Cowan; whereupon Wilbur Cowan winked his own left eye, that one being farthest from the speaker. The latter, having concluded his remarks for the moment, went to find his ball, and the two walked on.

"He just ought to be taken down," suggested Patricia, malevolently.

"Think so?" demanded Wilbur.

"Know so!" declared the girl. "'Tisn't only golf. He's that way about everything--telling people things--how to do it and everything. Only no one at our house dares come down on him. Harvey D. and Ella and even grandfather--they all jump through hoops for him, the cowards! I give him a jolt now and then, but I get talked to for it."

"The boy needs some golf talk--he certainly does," conceded the other.

"Too bad you're afraid to do it," Patricia said, resignedly.

She looked sadly away, then quickly back at him to see if it had taken.

She thought it hadn't. He was merely looking as if he also considered it too bad. But on the next tee he astonishingly a.s.serted himself as---comparatively--a golfing expert. He wasn't going to have this splendid brother, truly his brother for all the change of name, making a fool of himself before a girl. Full in the tide of Merle's jaunty discourse he blazed out with an authority of his own, and in tones so arrogant that the importance of the other oozed almost pitiably from him.

"Quit that! Listen! We've played ten holes, and you haven't made one clean drive, and I've got off every one clean. I make this course in seventy-three, and you'd never make it in one hundred and twenty the way you're going. But every time you stand there and tell me things about your drive and about mine as if you could really play golf."

"Well, but my dear chap--" Merle paused, trying to regain some lost spiritual value--"I'm merely telling you some little things about form."

"Forget it!" commanded the other. "You haven't any form yourself; you don't have form until you can play the game, and then you don't think about it. Maybe my form doesn't stick out, but you bet it must be tucked in there somewhere or I couldn't hit the ball. You don't want to think I haven't any just because I don't stand there and make a long speech to the ball before swatting it."

"Well, I was only saying----" Merle began again, but in meekness such as Patricia had never observed in him.