“I wanted to see you.  An’ I didn’t know whether you was coming down town to-night or not.”

“Well, I am.  So now you know.”  He pulled away from her, but she twined her arm the tighter about his.

“Ain’t sore at me, are yuh, Buzz?”

“No.  Leggo my arm.”

“If you’re sore because I been foolin’ round with that little wart of a Donahue—­” She turned wise eyes up to him, trying to make them limpid in the darkness.

“What do I care who you run with?”

“Don’t you care, Buzz?” The words were soft but there was a steel edge to her utterance.

“No.”

“Oh, Buzz, I’m batty about you.  I can’t help it, can I?  H’m?  Look here, you go on to Grand, and hang around for an hour, maybe, and I’ll meet you here an’ we’ll walk a ways.  Will you?  I got something to tell you.”

“Naw, I can’t to-night.  I’m busy.”

And then the steel edge cut.  “Buzz, if you turn me down I’ll have you up.”

“Up?”

“Before old Colt.  I can fix up charges.  He’ll believe it.  Say, he knows me, Judge Colt does.  I can name you an’—­”

“Me!” Sheer amazement rang in his voice.  “Me?  You must be crazy.  I ain’t had anything to do with you.  You make me sick.”

“That don’t make any difference.  You can’t prove it.  I told you I was crazy about you.  I told you—­”

He jerked loose from her then and was off.  He ran one block.  Then, after a backward glance, fell into a quick walk that brought him past the Brill House and to Schroeder’s drug store corner.  There was his crowd—­Spider, and Red, and Bing, and Casey.  They took him literally unto their breasts.  They thumped him on the back.  They bestowed on him the low epithets with which they expressed admiration.  Red worked at one of the bleaching vats in the Hatton paper mill.  The story of Buzz’s fistic triumph had spread through the big plant like a flame.

“Go on, Buzz, tell ’em about it,” Red urged, now.  “Je’s, I like to died laughing when I heard it.  He must of looked a sight, the poor boob.  Go on, Buzz, tell ’em how you says to him he must be a kind of delicate piece of—­you know; go on, tell ’em.”

Buzz hitched himself up with a characteristic gesture, and plunged into his story.  His audience listened entranced, interrupting him with an occasional “Je’s!” of awed admiration.  But the thing seemed to lack a certain something.  Perhaps Casey put his finger on that something when, at the recital’s finish he asked: 

“Didn’t he see you was goin’ to hit him?”

“No.  He never see a thing.”

Casey ruminated a moment.  “You could of give him a chanst to put up his dukes,” he said at last.  A little silence fell upon the group.  Honour among thieves.

Buzz shifted uncomfortably.  “He’s a bigger guy than I am.  I bet he’s over six foot.  The papers was always telling how he played football at that college he went to.”