about in little groups, laughing and talking excitedly, and in a moment, as the pianist began to hammer out a tune on the battered piano, broke into the measures of a waltz.
In the wild West of those days, passions were primitive, vengeance sudden, and retribution immediate.
Two dimples sentinelled a platoon of milk-white teeth.
“Won’t you dance with me, Mr. Ghost?” she coaxed.
Thoughtfully he pondered on love’s mystery. Pure but passionate. Appearances against her,’tis true. The foul breath of slander. She worked in a bawdy-house but her heart was clean. Outside of that, what can one say against her? He thought pleasantly of murder. With child’s eyes he regarded his extinct enemies. Men died violently but cleanly, in the movies. Bang-bang. Good-by, boys, I’m through. Through the head or heart—a clean hole, no blood. He had kept innocency. Do their guts or their brains come spilling out? Currant jelly where a face was, the chin shot off. Or down there that other—His arm beat the air like a wing: he writhed. If you lose that? Done, die. He clutched his throat in his anguish.
They bent down eastward along Academy Street, having turned right from the little caudal appendage that gave on the northeastern corner of the Square. The boy’s mind flamed with bright streaming images, sharp as gems, mutable as chameleons. His life was the shadow of a shadow, a play within a play. He became the hero— actor-star, the lord of the cinema, and the lover of a beautiful movie-queen, as heroic as his postures, with a superior actuality for every make-believe. He was the Ghost and he who played the Ghost, the cause that minted legend into fact.
He was those heroes whom he admired, and the victor, in beauty, nobility, and sterling worth, over those whom he despised because they always triumphed and were forever good and pretty and beloved of women. He was chosen and beloved of a bevy of internationally renowned beauties, vampires and pure sweet girls alike, with fruity blondes in the lead, all contesting for his favors, and some of the least scrupulous resorting to underhand practices in order to win him. Their pure eyes turned
