“He’ll git over it,” said Jake Clapp, in a precise country drawl, streaked with a note of bawdry.
“Every boy has got to go through the Calf–Love stage.
When I was about ‘Gene’s age —” He pressed his hard thigh gently against Florry, grinning widely and thinly with a few gold teeth.
He was a tall solid man, with a hard precise face, lewdly decorous, and slanting Mongol eyes.
His head was bald and knobby.
“He’d better watch out,” whined Florry sadly.
“I know what I’m talking about.
That boy’s not strong — he has no business to go prowling around to all hours the way he does.
He’s on the verge of —”
Eugene rocked gently on his feet, staring at the boarders with a steady hate.
Suddenly he snarled like a wild beast, and started down the porch, unable to speak, reeling, but snarling again and again his choking and insane fury.
“Miss Brown” meanwhile sat primly at the end of the porch, a little apart from the others.
From the dark sun-parlor at the side came swiftly the tall elegant figure of Miss Irene Mallard, twenty-eight, of Tampa, Florida.
She caught him at the step edge, and pulled him round sharply, gripping his arms lightly with her cool long fingers.
“Where are you going, ‘Gene?” she said quietly.
Her eyes of light violet were a little tired.
There was a faint exquisite perfume of rosewater.
“Leave me alone!” he muttered.
“You can’t go on like this,” she said in a low tone.
“She’s not worth it — none of them are.
Pull yourself together.”
“Leave me alone!” he said furiously.
“I know what I’m doing!”
He wrenched away violently, and leaped down into the yard, plunging around the house in a staggering run.
“Ben!” said Irene Mallard sharply.
Ben rose from the dark porch-swing where he had been sitting with Mrs. Pert.
“See if you can’t do something to stop him,” said Irene Mallard.
“He’s crazy,” Ben muttered.
“Which way did he go?”
“By there — around the house.
Go quick!”
Ben went swiftly down the shallow steps and loped back over the lawn.
The yard sloped sharply down: the gaunt back of Dixieland was propped upon a dozen rotting columns of whitewashed brick, fourteen feet high.
In the dim light, by one of these slender piers, already mined with crumbling ruins of wet brick, the scarecrow crouched, toiling with the thin grapevine of his arms against the temple.
“I will kill you, House,” he gasped.
“Vile and accursed House, I will tear you down.
I will bring you down upon the whores and boarders.
I will wreck you, House.”
Another convulsion of his shoulders brought down a sprinkling rain of dust and rubble.
“I will make you fall down on all the people in you, House,” he said.
“Fool!” cried Ben, leaping upon him, “what are you trying to do?”
He caught the boy’s arms from behind and dragged him back.
“Do you think you can bring her back to you by wrecking the house?
Are there no other women in the world, that you should let one get the best of you like this?”
“Let me go!
Let me go!” said Eugene.
“What does it matter to you?”
“Don’t think, fool, that I care,” said Ben fiercely.
“You’re hurting no one but yourself.
Do you think you’ll hurt the boarders by pulling the house down on your own head?