on your breast?” You make me sick, you damned fool. SHE’S no better, only you don’t know beans. She’ll let you spend all your money on her and then she’ll run off with some little pimp in an automobile for the rest of the night. Yes, that’s so. Do you want to make anything out of it? You big bluff. Come out into the back yard…. I’ll show you… take that… and that… and that…
Pumping his fists wildly, he fought his phantom into defeat and himself into exhaustion.
Luke had several hundred dollars saved from The Saturday Evening Post days, when he went off to school. He accepted very little money from Gant. He waited on tables, he solicited for college boarding-houses, he was the agent for a tailor who made Kippy Kampus Klothes. Gant boasted of these efforts. The town shifted its quid, nodded pertly, and spat, saying:
“That boy’ll make his mark.”
Luke worked as hard for an education as any other self-made man. He made every sacrifice. He did everything but study.
He was an immense popular success, so very extra, so very Luky. The school sought and adored him. Twice, after football games, he mounted a hearse and made funeral orations over the University of Georgia.
But, in spite of all his effort, toward the end of his third year he was still a sophomore, with every prospect of remaining one. One day in Spring he wrote the following letter to Gant:
“The b-b-b-bastards who r-r-run this place have it in for me. I’ve been c-c-c-crooked good and proper. They take your hard-earned m— m-money here and skin you. I’m g-g-g-going to a real school.”
He went to Pittsburgh and found work with the Westinghouse Electric Company. Three times a week at night he attended courses at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He made friends.
The war had come. After fifteen months in Pittsburgh he moved on to Dayton where he got employment at a boiler factory engaged in the fabrication of war materials.
