Belgians, with him asking her if she thought he shaded the staccato passage a mite too heavy, or some guff like that.
"So here come the concert, with every seat sold and the hall draped pretty with flags and cut flowers. Some of the boys was down from the ranch, and you bet I made 'em all come across for tickets, and old Safety First—Chet's father—I stuck him for a dollar one, though he had an evil look in his eyes. That's how the boys got so crazy about this here song. They brought that record back with 'em. And Buck Devine, that I met on the street that very day of the concert, he give me another kind of a little jolt. He'd been gossiping round town, the vicious way men do, and he says to me:
"'That Chester lad is taking awful chances for a man that needs his two hands at his work. Of course if he was a foot-racer or something like that, where he didn't need hands—' 'What's all this?' I asks. 'Why,' says Buck, 'he's had his nails rasped down to the quick till he almost screams if they touch anything, and he goes back for more every single day. It's a wonder they ain't mortified on him already; and say, it costs him six bits a throw and, of course, he don't take no change from a dollar—he leaves the extra two bits for a tip. Gee! A dollar a day for keeping your nails tuned up—and I ain't sure he don't have 'em done twice on Sundays. Mine ain't never had a file teched to 'em yet,' he says. 'I see that,' I says. 'If any foul-minded person ever accuses you of it, you got abundant proofs of your innocence right there with you. As for Chester,' I says, 'he has an object.' 'He has,' says Buck. 'Not what you think,' I says. 'Very different from that. It's true,' I concedes, 'that he ought to take that money and go to some good osteopath and have his head treated, but he's all right at that. Don't you set up nights worrying about it.' And I sent Buck slinking off shamefaced but unconvinced, I could see. But I wasn't a bit scared.
"Chet et supper with us the night of the concert and took Nettie and I to the hall, and you bet I wedged them two close in next each other when we got to our seats. This was my star play. If they didn't fall for each other now—Shucks! They had to. And I noticed they was more confidential already, with Nettie looking at him sometimes almost respectfully.
"Well, the concert went fine, with the hired lady professional singer giving us some operatic gems in various foreign languages in the first part, and Ed Bughalter singing "A King of the Desert Am I, Ha, Ha!" very bass—Ed always sounds to me like moving heavy furniture round that ain't got any casters under it—and Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale with the "Jewel Song" from Faust, that she learned in a musical conservatory at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and "Coming Through the Rye" for an encore—holding the music rolled up in her hands, though the Lord knows she knew every word and note of it by heart—and the North Side Ladies' String Quartet, and Wilbur Todd, of course, putting on more airs than as if he was the only son of old man Piano himself, while he shifted the gears and pumped, and Nettie whispering that he always slept two hours before performing in public and took no nourishment but one cup of warm milk—just a bundle of nerves that way—and she sent him up a bunch of lilies tied with lavender ribbon while he was bowing and scraping, but I didn't pay no attention to that, for now it was coming.
"Yes, sir, the last thing was this here lady professional, getting up stern and kind of sweetish sad in her low-cut black dress to sing the song of songs. I was awful excited for a party of my age, and I see they was, too. Nettie nudged Chet and whispered, 'Don't you just love it?' And Chet actually says, 'I love it,' so no wonder I felt sure, when up to that time he'd hardly been able to say a word except about his pa being willing to take them calves for almost nothing. Then I seen his eyes glaze and point off across the hall, and darned if there wasn't this manicure party in a cheek little hat and tailored gown, setting with Mrs. Henry Lehman and her husband. But still I felt all right, because him and Nettie was nudging each other intimately again when Professor Gluckstein started in on the accompaniment—I bet Wilbur thinks the prof is awful old-fashioned, playing with his fingers that way; I know they don't speak on the street.
"So this lady just floated into that piece with all the heart stops pulled out, and after one line I didn't begrudge her a cent of my fifty. I just set there and thrilled. I could feel Nettie and Chet thrilling, too, and I says, 'There's nothing to it—not from now on.'
"The applause didn't bust loose till almost a minute after she'd kissed the cross in that rich brown voice of hers, and even then my couple didn't join in. Nettie set still, all frozen and star-eyed, and Chester was choking and sniffling awful emotionally. 'I've sure nailed the young fools,' I thinks. And, of course, this lady had to sing it again, and not half through was she when, sure enough, I glanced down sideways and Chet's right hand and her left hand is squirming together till they look like a bunch of eels. 'All over but the rice,' I says, and at that I felt so good and thrilled! I was thinking back to my own time when I was just husband-high, though that wasn't so little, Lysander John being a scant six foot three—and our wedding tour to the Centennial and the trip to Niagara Falls—just soaking in old memories that bless and bind that this lady singer was calling up—well, you could have had anything from me right then when she kissed that cross a second time, just pouring her torn heart out. 'Worth every cent of that fifty,' I says.
"Then everybody was standing up and moving out—wiping their eyes a lot of 'em was—so I push on ahead quick, aiming to be more wily than ever and leave my couple alone. They don't miss me, either. When I look back, darned if they ain't kind of shaking hands right there in the hall. 'Quick work!' I says. 'You got to hand it to that song.' Even then I noticed Nettie was looking back to where Wilbur was tripping down from the platform, and Chester had his eyes glazed over on this manicure party. Still, they was gripping each other's hands right there before folks, and I think they're just a bit embarrassed. My old heart went right on echoing that song as I pushed forward—not looking back again, I was that certain.
"And to show you the mushy state I was in, here is old Safety First himself leering at me down by the door, with a clean shave and his other clothes on, and he says all about how it was a grand evening's musical entertainment and how much will the Belgians get in cold cash, anyway, and how about them hundred and fifty head of bull calves that he was willing to take off my hands, and me, all mushed up by that song as I am telling you, saying to him in a hearty manner, 'They're yours, Dave! Take 'em at your own price, old friend.' Honest, I said it just that way, so you can see. 'Oh, I'll be stuck on 'em at fifty a head,' says Dave, 'but I knew you'd listen to reason, we being such old neighbours.' 'I ain't heard reason since that last song,' I says. I'm listening to my heart, and it's a grand pity yours never learned to talk.' 'Fifty a head,' says the old robber.
"So, thus throwing away at least fifteen hundred dollars like it was a mere bagatelle or something, I walk out into the romantic night and beat it for home, wanting to be in before my happy couple reached there, so they'd feel free to linger over their parting. My, but I did feel responsible and dangerous, directing human destinies so brashly the way I had."
There was a pause, eloquent with unworded emotions.
Then "Human destinies, hell!" the lady at length intoned.
Hereupon I amazingly saw that she believed her tale to be done. I permitted the silence to go a minute, perhaps, while she fingered the cigarette paper and loose tobacco.
"And of course, then," I hinted, as the twin jets of smoke were rather viciously expelled.
"I should say so—'of course, then'—you got it. But I didn't get it for near an hour yet. I set up to my bedroom window in the dark, waiting excitedly, and pretty soon they slowly floated up to the front gate, talking in hushed tones and gurgles. 'Male and female created He them,' I says, flushed with triumph. The moon wasn't up yet, but you hadn't any trouble making out they was such. He was acting outrageously like a male and she was suffering it with the splendid courage which has long distinguished our helpless sex. And there I set, warming my old heart in it and expanding like one of them little squeezed-up sponges you see in the drug-store window which swells up so astonishing when you put it in water. I wasn't impatient for them to quit, oh, no! They seemed to clench and unclench and clench again,
