CHAPTER VIII

Casey looked battered and sad when the show people were through with him.  He had expected bandages wound picturesquely around his person, but the Barrymores were more artistic than that.  Casey’s right leg was drawn up at the knee so that he could not put his foot on the ground when he tried, and he did not know how the straps were fastened.  His left shoulder was higher than his right shoulder, and his eyes were sunken in his head and a scar ran down along his temple to his left cheek bone.  When he looked in the glass which Bill brought him, Casey actually felt ill.  They told him that he must not wash his face, and that his week’s growth of beard was a blessing from heaven.  The show lady begged him, with dew on her lashes, to play the part faithfully, and they departed, very happy over their prospects.

Casey did not know whether he was happy or not.  With Bill to encourage him and give him a lift over the gutters, he crossed the street to a restaurant and ordered largely of sirloin steak and French fried potatoes.  After supper there was a long evening to spend quietly on crutches, and The Club was just next door.  A man can always spend an evening very quickly at The Club—­or he could in the wet days—­if his money held out.  Casey had money enough, and within an hour he didn’t care whether he was crippled or not.  There were five besides himself at that table, and they had unanimously agreed to remove the lid.  Moreover, there was a crowd ten deep around that particular table.  For the news had gone out that here was Casey Ryan back again, a hopeless cripple, playing poker like a drunken Rockefeller and losing as if he liked to lose.

At eight o’clock the next morning Bill came in to tell Casey that the show people had brought up their car to be fixed, and was the pay good?  Casey replied Without looking up from his hand, which held a pair of queens which interested him.  He’d stand good, he said, and Bill gave a grunt and went off.

At noon Casey meant to eat something.  But another man had come into the game with a roll of money and a boastful manner.  Casey rubbed his cramped leg and hunched down in his chair again and called for a stack of blues.  Casey, I may as well confess, had been calling for stacks of blues and reds and whites rather often since midnight.

At four in the afternoon Casey hobbled into the restaurant and ate another steak and drank three cups of black coffee.  He meant to go across to the garage and have Bill hunt up the Barrymores and get them to unstrap him for awhile, but just as he was lifting his left crutch around the edge of the restaurant door, two women of Lund came up and began to pity him and ask him how it ever happened.  Casey could not remember, just at the moment, what story he had already told of his accident.  He stuttered—­a strange thing for an Irishman to do, by the way—­and retreated into The Club, where they dared not follow.