Archie was deeply concerned. So this was the explanation of that mysterious disaster, that weird tragedy which had puzzled the sporting press from coast to coast.
“Good God! Is he often taken like that?”
“Oh, he’s all right when he hasn’t had a fuss with m’ girl friend,” said the cigar-stand girl, indifferently. Her interest in baseball was tepid. Women are too often like this–mere butterflies, with no concern for the deeper side of life.
“Yes, but I say! What I mean to say, you know! Are they pretty pally now? The good old Dove of Peace flapping its little wings fairly briskly and all that?”
“Oh, I guess everything’s nice and smooth just now. I seen m’ girl friend yesterday, and Gus was taking her to the movies last night, so I guess everything’s nice and smooth.”
Archie breathed a sigh of relief.
“Took her to the movies, did he? Stout fellow!”
“I was at the funniest picture last week,” said the cigar-stand girl. “Honest, it was a scream! It was like this–”
Archie listened politely; then went in to get a bite of lunch. His equanimity, shaken by the discovery of the rift in the peerless one’s armour, was restored. Good old Biddle had taken the girl to the movies last night. Probably he had squeezed her hand a goodish bit in the dark. With what result? Why, the fellow would be feeling like one of those chappies who used to joust for the smiles of females in the Middle Ages. What he meant to say, presumably the girl would be at the game this afternoon, whooping him on, and good old Biddle would be so full of beans and buck that there would be no holding him.
Encouraged by these thoughts, Archie lunched with an untroubled mind. Luncheon concluded, he proceeded to the lobby to buy back his hat and stick from the boy brigand with whom he had left them. It was while he was conducting this financial operation that he observed that at the cigar-stand, which adjoined the coat-and-hat alcove, his friend behind the counter had become engaged in conversation with another girl.
This was a determined looking young woman in a blue dress and a large hat of a bold and flowery species, Archie happening to attract her attention, she gave him a glance out of a pair of fine brown eyes, then, as if she did not think much of him, turned to her companion and resumed their conversation–which, being of an essentially private and intimate nature, she conducted, after the manner of her kind, in a ringing soprano which penetrated into every corner of the lobby. Archie, waiting while the brigand reluctantly made change for a dollar bill, was privileged to hear every word.
“Right from the start I seen he was in a ugly mood. YOU know how he gets, dearie! Chewing his upper lip and looking at you as if you were so much dirt beneath his feet! How was -I- to know he’d lost fifteen dollars fifty-five playing poker, and anyway, I don’t see where he gets a licence to work off his grouches on me. And I told him so. I said to him, ‘Gus,’ I said, ‘if you can’t be bright and smiling and cheerful when you take me out, why do you come round at all? Was I wrong or right, dearie?”
The girl behind the counter heartily endorsed her conduct. “Once you let a man think he could use you as a door-mat, where were you?”
“What happened then, honey?”
“Well, after that we went to the movies.”
Archie started convulsively. The change from his dollar-bill leaped in his hand. Some of it sprang overboard and tinkled across the floor, with the brigand in pursuit. A monstrous suspicion had begun, to take root in his mind.
“Well, we got good seats, but–well, you know how it is, once things start going wrong. You know that hat of mine, the one with the daisies and cherries and the feather–I’d taken it off and given it him to hold when we went in, and what do you think that fell’r’d done? Put it on the floor and crammed it under the seat, just to save himself the trouble of holding it on his lap! And, when I showed him I was upset, all he said was that he was a pitcher and not a hatstand!”