Especially dance hall women

Long Jim Briggs wandered into Al’s Dance Hall one night when “Captain Mac” was drunk and throwing things.

She had splendid deep red hair and a skin as white as blanched almonds, and he admired her extravagantly. As a child admires a Christmas tree. And differently, too--very differently. He had even given up prospecting now and then and made good money as a carpenter so that he could spend it on her. He had spent it all, and he knew her very well, but he had never seen her drunk before. He had been in such places a good deal, but he hadn’t got used to seeing women drunk. It hurt him.

He was about to wander on out again when he heard one of the other girls say:

“She’s gonna pay for this all right! Al will make ’er come acrost with the expenses of the whole damn’ place for a month for that big mirror she broke!”

Long Jim hesitated and then started toward her. She took a saucer from one of the little tables and sailed it like a clay pigeon. It curved and hit him over the eye. The blood ran down his cheek and everybody laughed. He wiped it away with his handkerchief and put his hand on her arm just as she was going to throw another saucer.

“Why, Rosie--” he said reproachfully, in his soft, rumbling bass, and stopped helplessly. His soft black eyes looked out kindly above his soft brown mustache and his great soft brown beard, and said what his tongue couldn’t find the words for.

Captain Mac was madder than she was drunk. All her sensations and her thoughts were combined in one ache, like the ache in a tooth, and she was biting upon it savagely and taking a kind of satisfaction in the keen shoots of her pain. She could have knifed Al that night out of hand and seen through stoically whatever might have come of it, but Jim Briggs’ voice and his eyes were the kind of things she had forgotten the existence of, and they slipped in under her guard and pierced the quick of her.

She didn’t throw the other saucer, but suddenly Rosie Ellen McCarthy, a decent Irish girl, looked out of her eyes and said with a flash of passionate appeal--

“For God’s sake, Jim, take me out o’ this!”

Jim didn’t expect it. It touched him so deeply that he could only gulp and nod his head. With his great height and bent shoulders and baggy clothes he looked uncouth and awkward, standing beside painted, half nude Captain Mac in her spangled dress. He looked around helplessly for something to cover her shoulders with.

“This’ll do,” she said, stretching out her hand for a yellow scarf on the top of a gilded upright piano.

She took it with one strong pull, slinging heedlessly along the floor in a rain of broken bits half a dozen pieces of bric-a-brac that had rested upon it.

Jim folded the gaudy stuff clumsily about her and took her by the arm and started to go out, when Al came up and stood in front of him, dapper, suave and touched with cynicism.

“There’s money owing me,” he said politely, “and she ain’t going nowhere till it’s paid, see?”

The red surged into Jim’s cheeks, pale from working underground, and his voice rose dangerously out of its soft rumble.

“There’s a hell of a lot more than money owing you, you God-forgotten little skunk, and if you don’t get out o’ my way I’m liable to pay you the part of it you ain’t lookin’ for!”

He kept his eye on the other’s hands and his muscles braced. If you started things in Al’s place you finished them swiftly, or they finished you.

The white hairy fingers twitched into the expected signal and Jim swung the bony mass of his fist against Al’s ear as he would have swung a pick into a stubborn conglomeration of quartz. But that was incidental. He didn’t even notice where the little man rolled. Jerked forward by Al’s signal, a very different antagonist was coming on the jump--Hard Pan Schmitz, the dance hall bouncer.

Jim Briggs was no match for him and knew it. Almost as if he had followed through the blow that sent Al spinning, he snatched up a heavy lighted lamp, whirled it above his head and flung it. It struck Schmitz’s raised forearm, smashed down his guard and covered him with broken glass and burning oil.

In the stunned second before the racket began Jim took Rosie by the wrist and broke through to the street. Behind them the place seethed like an ants’ nest laid open by a spade.

He pulled her around the first corner. They pelted through the snow as fast as she could run. He zigzagged his way through the town, taking alleys when he could. They came at length to the door of a wooden shack below the level of the sidewalk, on an unlighted street. Its unpainted boards were warped, it listed heavily and, in common with all the other houses in the block, it looked deserted. But Jim jumped down to it, key in hand, and by the time Rosie had descended the rickety steps that led from the sidewalk he had opened the door.

He shut it behind her, struck a match and led the way into a room furnished with a stove, a camp cot, a chair and a small pine table with a smoke blackened lamp on it. He lighted the lamp. Rosie fell into the chair, breathing in big painful gulps. She wasn’t used to running. The great altitude--ten thousand feet--had played havoc with her breath. Jim had swung a pick there too long to be much affected. They looked at each other in the dim light.

“It’s jest a place to sleep,” he said awkwardly. “Nobody knows I own it. Feller gave it to me that struck it rich an’ went away. Mostly I’m in the hills anyhow. So wouldn’t anybody look for us here.”