Alice commenced to laugh again and to shake all over.
“There’s nothing funny,” the cook said. “You all laugh but there’s nothing funny. You two young lads; where are you bound for?”
“Where are you going yourself?” Tom asked him.
“I want to go to Cadillac,” the cook said. “Have you ever been there? My sister lives there.”
“He’s a sister himself,” the man in the slagged trousers said.
“Can’t you stop that sort of thing?” the cook asked. “Can’t we speak decently?”
“Cadillac is where Steve Ketchel came from and where Ad Wolgast is from,” the shy man said.
“Steve Ketchel,” one of the blondes said in a high voice as though the name had pulled a trigger in her. “His own father shot and killed him. Yes, by Christ, his own father. There aren’t any more men like Steve Ketchel.”
“Wasn’t his name Stanley Ketchel?” asked the cook.
“Oh, shut up,” said the blonde. “What do you know about Steve? Stanley. He was no Stanley. Steve Ketchel was the finest and most beautiful man that ever lived. I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beautiful as Steve Ketchel. There never was a man like that. He moved just like a tiger and he was the finest, free-est spender that ever lived.”
“Did you know him?” one of the men asked.
“Did I know him? Did I know him? Did I love him? You ask me that? I knew him like you know nobody in the world and I loved him like you love God. He was the greatest, finest, whitest, most beautiful man that ever lived, Steve Ketchel, and his own father shot him down like a dog.”
“Were you out on the coast with him?”
“No. I knew him before that. He was the only man I ever loved.”
Every one was very respectful to the peroxide blonde, who said all this in a high stagey way, but Alice was beginning to shake again. I felt it sitting by her.
“You should have married him,” the cook said.
