by his own hand! Ugh!! Why not chop that stinking hand off? And, on coming back to Branton Hills, watching that darling Mary in Salvation Army uniform, tramping, talking, praying for just such low-down “liquor hounds” as.
Oh! It was an awful fight! A long, brain-racking onslaught against a villain shut in by walls of iron! But though Norman Antor’s night-camp fights with Norman Antor had “put a big kick” in his wish to “lay off that stuff,” just a final blow, just an awful brain-crashing blast was still missing, so that that big right hand might point skyward, to clinch that vow. And that blast was waiting for Norman! To anybody standing around, it wasn’t much of a blast; but it was! It was a mighty concussion of T.N.T., coming as Mary, young, loving, praying Mary, said, as his arms unwound from around that frail form;—
“Why, Norman! Not drunk?”
God!! What flashing, shooting, sizzling sparks shot through his brain!! Up, out, in; all kinds of ways!! What crashing bombs!!
And, that first calm night on Old Lady Flanagan’s porch; that moonlit night of bliss, with soft, cuddling, snuggling, laughing, crying darling Mary!
“I say,” Norman was shouting, inwardly;
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