“You’ll have to wait till the excitement over Lee’s surrender has died down.
Come on,” he said abruptly, getting up, “let’s go over to the Greasy Spoon.”
He thrust his big head down into the deep well of the sink, letting the lukewarm water sluice refreshingly over his broad neck and blue-white sallow night-time face, strong, tough, and humorous.
He soaped his hands with thick slathering suds, his muscles twisting slowly like big snakes.
He sang in his powerful quartette baritone:
“Beware!
Beware!
Beware!
Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep,
So beware!
Bee-WARE!”
Comfortably they rested in the warm completed exhaustion of the quiet press-room: upstairs the offices, bathed in green-yellow light, sprawled like men relaxed after work.
The boys had gone to their routes.
The place seemed to breathe slowly and wearily.
The dawn-sweet air washed coolly over their faces.
The sky was faintly pearled at the horizon.
Strangely, in sharp broken fragments, life awoke in the lilac darkness.
Clop-clopping slowly on the ringing street, Number Six, Mrs. Goulderbilt’s powerful brown mare, drew inevitably on the bottle-clinking cream-yellow wagon, racked to the top with creamy extra-heavy high-priced milk.
The driver was a fresh-skinned young countryman, richly odorous with the smell of fresh sweat and milk.
Eight miles, through the starlit dewy fields and forests of Biltburn, under the high brick English lodgegate, they had come into the town.
At the Pisgah Hotel, opposite the station, the last door clicked softly; the stealthy footfalls of the night ceased; Miss Bernice Redmond gave the negro porter eight one-dollar bills and went definitely to bed with the request that she be not disturbed until one o’clock; a shifting engine slatted noisily about in the yard; past the Biltburn crossing Tom Cline whistled with even, mournful respirations.
By this time Number 3 had delivered 142 of his papers; he had only to ascend the rickety wooden stairs of the Eagle Crescent bank to finish the eight houses of the Crescent.
He looked anxiously across the hill-and-dale-sprawled negro settlement to the eastern rim: behind Birdseye Gap the sky was pearl-gray — the stars looked drowned.
Not much time left, he thought.
He had a blond meaty face, pale-colored and covered thickly with young blond hair.
His jaw was long and fleshy: it sloped backward.
He ran his tongue along his full cracked underlip.
A 1910 model, four-cylinder, seven-passenger Hudson, with mounting steady roar, shot drunkenly out from the station curbing, lurched into the level negro-sleeping stretch of South End Avenue, where the firemen had their tournaments, and zipped townward doing almost fifty.
The station quietly stirred in its sleep: there were faint reverberating noises under the empty sheds; brisk hammer-taps upon car wheels, metallic heel-clicks in the tiled waiting-room.
Sleepily a negress slopped water on the tiles, with languid sullen movement pushing a gray sopping rag around the floor.
It was now five-thirty.
Ben had gone out of the house into the orchard at three twenty-five.
In another forty minutes Gant would waken, dress, and build the morning fires.
“Ben,” said Harry Tugman, as they walked out of the relaxed office, “if Jimmy Dean comes messing around my press-room again they can get some one else to print their lousy sheet.
What the hell!
I can get a job on the Atlanta Constitution whenever I want it.”
“Did he come down to-night?” asked Ben.
“Yes,” said Harry Tugman, “and he got out again.
I told him to take his little tail upstairs.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Ben.
“What did he say?”
“He said,
‘I’M the editor!
I’m the editor of this paper!’
‘I don’t give a good goddam,’ I said, ‘if you’re the President’s snotrag.
If you want any paper today keep out of the pressroom.’
And believe me, he went!”
In cool blue-pearl darkness they rounded the end of the Post Office and cut diagonally across the street to Uneeda Lunch No. 3.
It was a small beanery, twelve feet wide, wedged in between an optician’s and a Greek shoe parlor.