all his movements and for a moment puffed slowly, wheezing reflectively over it.
“Not that he was ever much like a boy,” he grunted suddenly, with a surprising flash of insight. “He was always more like an old man—didn’t ever seem to be a kid like the others. Why,” suddenly he chuckled with a phlegmy hoarseness, “I remember when he first began to come down there in the morning as a carrier, the other kids all called him’Pop.’That was Ben for you. Always had that scowl on his face, even when he was laughing—as serious and earnest as an old man. But he was one of the best—as good as they come.” Again he coughed chokingly, bent over with a painful grunt, and cleared his throat phlegmily into the polished brass spittoon beside him. Then, wheezing a little, he drew the wadded silk handkerchief from a side-pocket, wiped his mouth with it, raised himself up in his seat a little, and settled back slowly, tenderly, wheezing, with a sigh! Then for a moment he laboured painfully, eyes closed, with his rapid wheezing breath and finally, when it seemed he must be exhausted by his efforts and done with conversation for the evening, he wheezed faintly and unexpectedly.
“That was Ben.”
“Oh, I remember that boy now,” the swarthy pompous-looking man suddenly broke in with a flash of recollective inspiration—“Wasn’t Ben the boy who used to stand in the windows of The Courier offices when the World Series was being played, and post the score up on the score-board as they phoned it in to him?”
“Yes,” wheezed Mr. Flood, nodding heavily. “You got him now, all right. That was Ben.”
“I remember now,” the swarthy little man said thoughtfully, with a far-away look in his eye. “I was thinking about him the other day when I went by The Courier office. They were playing the Series then. They had another fellow in the window and I wondered what had become of him. So that was Ben?”
“Yes,” Mr. Flood wheezed hoarsely again. “That was Ben.”
For a moment as the gouty old rake had spoken of the boy’s dead brother, the boy had felt within him a sense of warmth: a wakening of dead time, a stir of grateful affection for the gross old man as if there might have been in this bloated carcass some trace of understanding for the dead boy of whom he spoke—an understanding faint and groping as a
