Spring Street | Page 2

of stopping the phonograph.
The blind on a window of the house next door was pulled to one side, emitting a shaft of light across the path he paced. A head--the head of the little girl his father had so often petted as he strode up the walk when he came home from work--shut off the light. He heard a scuffle of feet and she was pulled from the window.
Mrs. Sprockett's husband, in his shirt sleeves, came over and stood on the sidewalk.
"Is Maude in there with your mother?" he asked.
John looked at him, without a word.
"Beg your pardon," said Mrs. Sprockett's husband, backing away. "She didn't say--didn't leave any word--and the baby--and--"
The crying of the Sprockett baby could be heard faintly.
"I didn't think--I--I----" and Mrs. Sprockett's husband turned awkwardly and went back to the house.
Everything was quiet, so quiet that it startled him. A mocking bird warbled in a tree by the porch. He remembered his father saying one night that there was no music sweeter than its song.
Fragments of memory came to him vividly. His father pulling him from under a bed the night he was punished for stealing apples at the corner grocery store. His father reading David Copperfield to him and their mutual rejoicing when Betsy Trotwood lectured David's firm stepfather. His father closing his eyes and leaning back and a soft smile on his lips as his mother played "Annie Laurie."
These thoughts carried him away so that he stopped quickly when they left him. For a moment he could not realize that death was taking his father. He felt he had been out of his head, walking out there, that it was all a horrible nightmare. He almost began to laugh and dash up to the door to find things as they always had been. He staggered back with an impulse to shout in his agony as realization came back to him.
A wild hope seized him. He had been walking there for hours, for days it seemed, and the door had not opened. Perhaps the doctor was wrong, after all. Perhaps his father had rallied strength and would live. His heart beat exultingly. Perhaps----
And then the door opened.
* * * * *
He knew that his father had left them nothing but what was in the house. He had not spoken to his mother about it. He had been beside her bed until after dawn when, with a gentle sigh, she had slipped off into a merciful sleep.
Mrs. Sprockett, who left them only for a few minutes in the morning, he thanked with a guilty feeling of having not appreciated what she had done. The doctor had spoken to him kindly.
"My boy," he said, "this comes to all of us. Your father passed as gently as he lived. Remember, there's no sorrow nor suffering where he has gone and--be good to your mother."
It was not until after the funeral that John and his mother talked of the life before them. He told her that they would not have to leave their little home, that he would quit school and find work so they could go on together.
"Dearest, dearest mother, you shall be with me always," he said to her. But she replied:
"We owe a heavy debt, John, that must be paid at once."
He saw she was worrying over the expense of his father's funeral. He knew how sensitive she was about debts.
"I can get money somewhere, dearest mother," he said. "Don't worry."
"But where?"
"Somewhere--I'll get it. Please, oh, please don't think about it any more."
He could tell, however, that she could not put it out of her mind. There was a look about her eyes that told him it weighed upon her. It disappeared when he held her in his arms and comforted her; she tried bravely to hide it from him, but it was there, in his mind, haunting him.
He came to his decision about the money for the funeral director quickly. He told her he was going to look for work and went to George Blake at his Spring street gymnasium. Blake, an instructor in boxing, had seen him spar in amateur bouts and had taken him in tow. He boxed because he liked it; never with a thought of ever fighting for money. Only a month before he had refused an offer of a bout at Jack Doyle's Vernon arena.
"George," he said, "can you get me a bout at Vernon?"
"What's the big idea?" asked Blake with a smile.
"I need the money."
"How soon?"
"As soon as I can get it."
"I'll see Wad Wadhams, tonight," Blake said. "If there's a place on the bill I'll get it for you."
The next day Blake called him to the gymnasium.
"You'll go on in the preliminaries," he said. "Two hundred if you win, a hundred if you draw and fifty if you