15a The Prince and Betty

The circle of lamplight became as if by mutual consent a general rendezvous. Three gray-clad policemen, tough, clean-shaven men with keen eyes and square jaws, stood there, revolvers in one hand, night sticks in the other. Smith, hatless and muddy, joined them. John and the Kid, the latter bleeding freely from his left ear, the lobe of which had been chipped by a bullet, were the last to arrive.

“What’s been the rough-house?” inquired one of the policemen, mildly interested.

“Do you know a sport of the name of Repetto?” enquired Smith.

“Jack Repetto? Sure.”

“He belongs to the Three Points,” said another intelligent officer, as one naming some fashionable club.

“When next you see him,” said Smith, “I should be obliged if you would use your authority to make him buy me a new hat. I could do with another pair of trousers, too, but I will not press the trousers. A new hat is, however, essential. Mine has a six-inch hole in it.”

“Shot at you, did they?” said one of the policemen, as who should say, “Tut, tut!”

“Shot at us!” burst out the ruffled Kid. “What do you think’s been happening? Think an aeroplane ran into my ear and took half of it off? Think the noise was somebody opening bottles of pop? Think those guys that sneaked off down the road was just training for a Marathon?”

“Comrade Brady,” said Smith, “touches the spot. He—”

“Say, are you Kid Brady?” enquired one of the officers. For the first time the constabulary had begun to display real animation.

“Reckoned I’d seen you somewhere!” said another. “You licked Cyclone Dick all right, Kid, I hear.”

“And who but a bone-head thought he wouldn’t?” demanded the third warmly. “He could whip a dozen Cyclone Dicks in the same evening with his eyes shut.”

“He’s the next champeen,” admitted the first speaker.

“If he juts it over Jimmy Garvin,” argued the second.

“Jimmy Garvin!” cried the third. “He can whip twenty Jimmy Garvins with his feet tied. I tell you—”

“I am loath,” observed Smith, “to interrupt this very impressive brain barbecue, but, trivial as it may seem to you, to me there is a certain interest in this other little matter of my ruined hat. I know that it may strike you as hypersensitive of us to protest against being riddled with bullets, but—”

“Well, what’s been doin’?” inquired the Force. It was a nuisance, this perpetual harping on trifles when the deep question of the light-weight championship of the world was under discussion, but the sooner it was attended to, the sooner it would be over.

John undertook to explain.

“The Three Points laid for us,” he said. “This man, Jack Repetto, was bossing the crowd. The Kid put one over on to Jack Repetto’s chin, and we were asking him a few questions when the rest came back, and started shooting. Then we got to cover quick, and you came up and they beat it.”

“That,” said Smith, nodding, “is a very fair precis of the evening’s events. We should like you, if you will be so good, to corral this Comrade Repetto, and see that he buys me a new hat.”

“We’ll round Jack up,” said one of the policemen indulgently.

“Do it nicely,” urged Smith. “Don’t go hurting his feelings.”

The second policeman gave it as his opinion that Jack was getting too gay. The third policeman conceded this. Jack, he said, had shown signs for some time past of asking for it in the neck. It was an error on Jack’s part, he gave his hearers to understand, to assume that the lid was completely off the great city of New York.

“Too blamed fresh he’s gettin’,” the trio agreed. They seemed to think it was too bad of Jack.

“The wrath of the Law,” said Smith, “is very terrible. We will leave the matter, then, in your hands. In the meantime, we should be glad if you would direct us to the nearest subway station. Just at the moment, the cheerful lights of the Great White Way are what I seem chiefly to need.”

So ended the opening engagement of the campaign, in a satisfactory but far from decisive victory for the Peaceful Moments‘ army.

“The victory,” said Smith, “was not bloodless. Comrade Brady’s ear, my hat—these are not slight casualties. On the other hand, the elimination of Comrade Repetto is pleasant. I know few men whom I would not rather meet on a lonely road than Comrade Repetto. He is one of nature’s black-jackers. Probably the thing crept upon him slowly. He started, possibly, in a merely tentative way by slugging one of the family circle. His aunt, let us say, or his small brother. But, once started, he is unable to resist the craving. The thing grips him like dram-drinking. He black-jacks now not because he really wants to, but because he cannot help himself. There’s something singularly consoling in the thought that Comrade Repetto will no longer be among those present.”

“There are others,” said John.

“As you justly remark,” said Smith, “there are others. I am glad we have secured Comrade Brady’s services. We may need them.”

CHAPTER XX

BETTY AT LARGE

It was not till Betty found herself many blocks distant from the office of Peaceful Moments that she checked her headlong flight. She had run down the stairs and out into the street blindly, filled only with that passion for escape which had swept her away from Mervo. Not till she had dived into the human river of Broadway and reached Times Square did she feel secure. Then, with less haste, she walked on to the park, and sat down on a bench, to think.

Inevitably she had placed her own construction on John’s sudden appearance in New York and at the spot where only one person in any way connected with Mervo knew her to be. She did not know that Smith and he were friends, and did not, therefore, suspect that the former and not herself might be the object of his visit. Nor had any