Yet she was fated to discover that the world offered worse than golf, for Wilbur Cowan had not yet completed, in the process of his desultory education, the out-of-doors curriculum offered by even the little world of Newbern. He was to take up an entirely new study, with the whole-hearted enthusiasm that had made him an adept at linotypes, gas engines, and the sport of kings. Not yet, in Winona’s view, had he actually gone down into the depths of social obliquity; but she soon knew he had made the joyous descent.
The dreadful secret was revealed when he appeared for his supper one evening with a black eye. That is, it would have been known technically as a black eye—even Winona knew what to call it. Actually it was an eye of many colours, shading delicately from pale yellow at the edge to richest variegated purple at the centre. The eye itself—it was the right—was all but closed by the gorgeously puffed tissue surrounding it, and of no practical use to its owner. The still capable left eye, instead of revealing concern for this ignominy, gleamed a lively pride in its overwhelming completeness. The malign eye was worn proudly as a badge of honour, so proudly that the wearer, after Winona’s first outcry of horror, bubbled vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma by stepping into one of Spike Brennon’s straight lefts. Nothing less than that!
Winona, conceiving that this talk was meant to describe an accident of the most innocent character, demanded further details; wishing to be told what a straight left was; why a person named Spike Brennon kept such things about; and how Wilbur had been so careless as to step into one. She instinctively pictured a straight left to be something like an open door into which the victim had stepped in the dark. Her enlightenment was appalling. When the boy had zestfully pictured with pantomime of the most informing sort she not only knew what a straight left was, but she knew that Wilbur Cowan, in stepping into one—in placing himself where by any chance he could step into one—had flung off the ultimate restraint of decency.
It amounted to nothing less, she gathered, than that her charge had formed a sinister alliance with a degraded prize-fighter, a low bully who for hire and amid the foulest surroundings pandered to the basest instincts of his fellowmen by disgusting exhibitions of brute force. As if that were not enough, this low creature had fallen lower in the social scale, if that were possible, by tending bar in the unspeakable den of Pegleg McCarron. It was of no use for Wilbur to explain to her that his new hero chose this humble avocation because it afforded him leisure for training between his fights; that he didn’t drink or smoke, but kept himself in good condition; that it was a fine chance to learn how to box, because Spike needed sparring partners.
“Oh, it’s terrible!” cried Winona. “A debased creature like that!”
“You ought to see him stripped!” rejoined the boy in quick pride.