As soon as he was facing Terry in the ring--Joe so he related
with pride in his cleverness--began to "guy"--"Well, you Irish
fake--so the kid's dead--eh? Who was its pa, say?--the dirty
little bastard--or does the wife know which one it was----" and
so on. And Terry, insane with grief and fury, fought wild--and
Joe became a champion.
As she listened Susan grew cold with horror and with hate.
Estelle said:
"Tell the rest of it, Joe."
"Oh, that was nothing," replied he.
When he strolled away to talk with some friends Estelle told
"the rest" that was "nothing." The championship secure, Joe
had paid all Terry's bills, had supported Terry and his wife
for a year, had relapsed into old habits and "pulled off a job"
of safe-cracking because, the prize-fighting happening to pay
poorly, he would have had a default on the payments for a month
or so. He was caught, did a year on the Island before his
"pull" could get him out. And all the time he was in the "pen"
he so arranged it with his friends that the invalid Terry and
his invalid wife did not suffer. And all this he had done not
because he had a sense of owing Terry, but because he was of
the "set" in which it is the custom to help anybody who happens
to need it, and aid begun becomes an obligation to "see it through."
It was an extreme case of the moral chaos about her--the chaos
she had begun to discover when she caught her aunt and Ruth
conspiring to take Sam away from her.
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