Garrisons Finish | Page 9

smiled upon her at
last. But it was only hell. Garrison loved his wife, for love is not a
quality possessed only by the virtuous. Sometimes the worst man can
love the most--in his selfish way. And Garrison resented the arrival of
Billy. He resented sharing his wife's affection with the boy.
In time he came to hate his son. Billy's education was chiefly
constitutional. There wasn't the money to pay for his education for any
length of time. His mother had to fight for it piecemeal. So he took his
education in capsules; receiving a dose in one city and jumping to
another for the next, according as a track opened.
He knew his father never cared for him, though his mother tried her
best to gloze over the indifference of her husband. But Billy understood
and resented it. He and his mother loved in secret. When she died, her
mistake lived out to the best of her ability, young Garrison promptly
ran away from his circulating home. He knew nothing of his father's
people; nothing of his mother's. He was a young derelict; his inherent
sense of honor and an instinctive desire for cleanliness kept him off the
rocks.
The years between the time he left home and the period when he won
his first mount on the track, his natural birthright, Billy Garrison often
told himself he would never care to look back upon. He was young, and

he did not know that years of privation, of hardship, of semi-
starvation--but with an insistent ambition goading one on--are not years
to eliminate in retrospect. They are years to reverence.
He did not know that prosperity, not adversity, is the supreme test. And
when the supreme test came; when the goal was attained, and the
golden sun of wealth, fame, and honor beamed down upon him, little
Billy Garrison was found wanting. He was swamped by the flood. He
went the way of many a better, older, wiser man--the easy, rose-strewn
way, big and broad and scented, that ends in a bottomless abyss filled
with bitter tears and nauseating regrets; the abyss called, "It might have
been."
Where he had formerly shunned vice by reason of adversity and
poverty making it appear so naked, revolting, unclean, foreign to his
state, prosperity had now decked it out in her most sensuous, alluring
garments. Red's moral diatribe had been correct. Garrison had followed
the band-wagon to the finish, never asking where it might lead; never
caring. He had youth, reputation, money--he could never overdraw that
account. And so the modern pied piper played, and little Garrison
blindly danced to the music with the other fools; danced on and on until
he was swallowed up in the mountain.
Then he awoke too late, as they all awake; awoke to find that his vigor
had been sapped by early suppers and late breakfasts; his finances
depleted by slow horses and fast women; his nerve frayed to ribbons by
gambling. And then had come that awful morning when he first
commenced to cough. Would he, could he, ever forget it?
Billy Garrison huddled down now in the roaring train as he thought of
it. It was always before him, a demoniacal obsession--that morning
when he coughed, and a bright speck of arterial blood stood out like a
tardy danger-signal against the white of his handkerchief; it was leering
at him, saying: "I have been here always, but you have chosen to be
blind."
Consumption--the jockey's Old Man of the Sea--had arrived at last. He
had inherited the seeds from his father; he had assiduously cultivated

them by making weight against all laws of nature; by living against
laws of God and man. Now they had been punished as they always are.
Nature had struck, struck hard.
That had been the first warning, and Garrison did not heed it. Instead of
quitting the game, taking what little assets he had managed to save
from the holocaust, and living quietly, striving for a cure, he kicked
over the traces. The music of the pied piper was still in his ears;
twisting his brain. He gritted his teeth. He would not give in. He would
show that he was master. He would fight this insidious vitality vampire;
fight and conquer.
Besides, he had to make money. The thought of going back to a
pittance a year sickened him. That pittance had once been a fortune to
him. But his appetite had not been gorged, satiated; rather, it had the
resilience of crass youth; jumping the higher with every indulgence. It
increased in ratio with his income. He had no one to guide him; no one
to compel advice with a whip, if necessary. He knew it all. So he kept
his curse secret. He would pile up one