Chick heard the side
door bang again, and a moment later the gallop of a horse.
Then everything was still, but the noisy beating of his heart that
threatened to burst its confines. Through the crack he saw the table
with its broken tumblers, and the whisky drip, dripping on the floor;
he saw the chairs overturned, and the gas-jet flickering in the wind
from the broken window.
The thing he could not see was what lay in the corner, the huddled-up,
blood-stained hulk of a something for which a smiling, fat woman and
six tow-headed youngsters were waiting across the common. Chick
crawled to the head of the stairs, and as he reached the top step his
hand touched a hard object. He picked it up and held it to the light,
and as he did so, the joy that often blossoms on the brink of tragedy
was his for a moment. It was the riding whip whose handle he had
fallen heir to that afternoon!
Down the steps, through the door and out into the rain-soaked night he
sped; across the common, through the switch-yard, and down the narrow,
noisome darkness of Bean Alley. Over a ram-shackled fence, and up a
dilapidated porch he clambered like a cat, until he reached the small
loft in the Flathers' two-roomed mansion which he called home.
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