Come on, Doc. Take a drink.”
“I dont give a damn,” Doc said.
“Hand it here.”
They returned to town.
“The Shack’ll be open,” the first said.
“At the depot.”
It was a confectionery-lunchroom.
It was empty save for a man in a soiled apron.
They went to the rear and entered an alcove with a table and four chairs.
The man brought four glasses and coca-colas.
“Can I have some sugar and water and a lemon, Cap?” Gowan said.
The man brought them.
The others watched Gowan make a whiskey sour.
“They taught me to drink it this way,” he said.
They watched him drink.
“Hasn’t got much kick, to me,” he said, filling his glass from the jar.
He drank that.
“You sure do drink it,” the third said.
“I learned in a good school.”
There was a high window. Beyond it the sky was paler, fresher.
“Have another, gentlemen,” he said, filling his glass again.
The others helped themselves moderately.
“Up at school they consider it better to go down than to hedge,” he said.
They watched him drink that one.
They saw his nostrils bead suddenly with sweat.
“That’s all for him, too,” Doc said.
“Who says so?” Gowan said.
He poured an inch into the glass.
“If we just had some decent liquor.
I know a man in my county named Goodwin that makes——”
“That’s what they call a drink up at school,” Doc said.
Gowan looked at him.
“Do you think so?
Watch this.”
He poured into the glass.
They watched the liquor rise.
“Look out, fellow,” the third said.
Gowan filled the glass level full and lifted it and emptied it steadily.
He remembered setting the glass down carefully, then he became aware simultaneously of open air, of a chill gray freshness and an engine panting on a siding at the head of a dark string of cars, and that he was trying to tell someone that he had learned to drink like a gentleman.
He was still trying to tell them, in a cramped dark place smelling of ammonia and creosote, vomiting into a receptacle, trying to tell them that he must be at Taylor at six-thirty, when the special arrived.
The paroxysm passed; he felt extreme lassitude, weakness, a desire to lie down which was forcibly restrained, and in the flare of a match he leaned against the wall, his eyes focussing slowly upon a name written there in pencil.
He shut one eye, propped against the wall, swaying and drooling, and read the name.
Then he looked at them, wagging his head.
“Girl name.……Name girl I know.
Good girl.
Good sport.
Got date take her to Stark.……Starkville.
No chap’rone, see?”
Leaning there, drooling, mumbling, he went to sleep.
At once he began to fight himself out of sleep.