CARTER WATSON, a current magazine under his arm, strolled slowly along, gazing about him curiously.Twenty years had elapsed since he had been on this particular street, and the changes were great and stupefying.This Western city of three hundred thousand souls had contained but thirty thousand, when, as a boy, he had been wont to ramble along its streets.In those days the street he was now on had been a quiet residence street in the respectable workingclass quarter.On this late afternoon he found that it had been submerged by a vast and vicious tenderloin.Chinese and Japanese shops and dens abounded, all confusedly intermingled with low white resorts and boozing dens.This quiet street of his youth had become the toughest quarter of the city.
He looked at his watch.It was half-past five.It was the slack time of the day in such a region, as he well knew, yet he was curious to see.In all his score of years of wandering and studying social conditions over the world, he had carried with him the memory of his old town as a sweet and wholesome place.
The metamorphosis he now beheld was startling.He certainly must continue his stroll and glimpse the infamy to which his town had descended.
Another thing: Carter Watson had a keen social and civic consciousness.Independently wealthy, he had been loath to dissipate his energies in the pink teas and freak dinners of society, while actresses, race-horses, and kindred diversions had left him cold.He had the ethical bee in his bonnet and was a reformer of no mean pretension, though his work had been mainly in the line of contributions to the heavier reviews and quarterlies and to the publication over his name of brightly, cleverly written books on the working classes and the slum-dwellers.Among the twenty-seven to his credit occurred titles such as, "If Christ Came to New Orleans," " The Worked-out Worker," "Tenement Reform in Berlin," "The Rural Slums of England," "The people of the East Side," "Reform Versus Revolution," "The University Settlement as a Hot Bed of Radicalism' and "The Cave Man of Civilization."But Carter Watson was neither morbid nor fanatic.He did not lose his head over the horrors he encountered, studied, and exposed.No hair brained enthusiasm branded him.His humor saved him, as did his wide experience and his con.conservative philosophic temperament.Nor did he have any patience with lightning change reform theories.As he saw it, society would grow better only through the painfully slow and arduously painful processes of evolution.There were no short cuts, no sudden regenerations.The betterment of mankind must be worked out in agony and misery just as all past social betterments had been worked out.
But on this late summer afternoon, Carter Watson was curious.
As he moved along he paused before a gaudy drinking place.The sign above read, "The Vendome." There were two entrances.One evidently led to the bar.This he did not explore.The other was a narrow hallway.Passing through this he found himself in a huge room, filled with chair-encircled tables and quite deserted.In the dim light he made out a piano in the distance.
Making a mental note that he would come back some time and study the class of persons that must sit and drink at those multitudinous tables, he proceeded to circumnavigate the room.
Now, at the rear, a short hallway led off to a small kitchen, and here, at a table, alone, sat Patsy Horan, proprietor of the Vendome, consuming a hasty supper ere the evening rush of business.Also, Patsy Horan was angry with the world.He had got out of the wrong side of bed that morning, and nothing had gone right all day.Had his barkeepers been asked, they would have described his mental condition as a grouch.But Carter Watson did not know this.As he passed the little hallway, Patsy Horan's sullen eyes lighted on the magazine he carried under his arm.Patsy did not know Carter Watson, nor did he know that what he carried under his arm was a magazine.Patsy, out of the depths of his grouch, decided that this stranger was one of those pests who marred and scarred the walls of his back rooms by tacking up or pasting up advertisements.The color on the front cover of the magazine convinced him that it was such an advertisement.Thus the trouble began.Knife and fork in hand, Patsy leaped for Carter Watson.
"Out wid yeh!" Patsy bellowed."I know yer game!"Carter Watson was startled.The man had come upon him like the eruption of a jack-in-the-box.
"A defacin' me walls," cried Patsy, at the same time emitting a string of vivid and vile, rather than virile, epithets of opprobrium.
"If I have given any offense I did not mean to--"But that was as far as the visitor got.Patsy interrupted.
"Get out wid yeh; yeh talk too much wid yer mouth," quoted Patsy, emphasizing his remarks with flourishes of the knife and fork.
Carter Watson caught a quick vision of that eating-fork inserted uncomfortably between his ribs, knew that it would be rash to talk further with his mouth, and promptly turned to go.
The sight of his meekly retreating back must have further enraged Patsy Horan, for that worthy, dropping the table implements, sprang upon him.
Patsy weighed one hundred and eighty pounds.So did Watson.In this they were equal.But Patsy was a rushing, rough-and-tumble saloon-fighter, while Watson was a boxer.In this the latter had the advantage, for Patsy came in wide open, swinging his right in a perilous sweep.All Watson had to do was to straight-left him and escape.But Watson had another advantage.
His boxing, and his experience in the slums and ghettos of the world, had taught him restraint.
He pivoted on his feet, and, instead of striking, ducked the other's swinging blow and went into a clinch.But Patsy, charging like a bull, had the momentum of his rush, while Watson, whirling to meet him, had no momentum.As a result, the pair of them went down, with all their three hundred and sixty pounds of weight, in a long crashing fall, Watson underneath.