PAGE 3
Transformation Of Martin Burney
by
“All a-right,” said Tony. “But better wait ’bout-a ten minute more. Give-a Corrigan plenty time get good-a sleep.”
They waited, sitting upon the stone. The rest of the men were at work out of sight around a bend in the road. Everything would have gone well — except, perhaps, with Corrigan, had not Tony been moved to decorate the plot with its conventional accompaniment. He was of dramatic blood, and perhaps he intuitively divined the appendage to villainous machinations as prescribed by the stage. He pulled from his shirt bosom a long, black, beautiful, venomous cigar, and handed it to Burney.
“You like-a smoke while we wait?” he asked.
Burney clutched it and snapped off the end as a terrier bites at a rat. He laid it to his lips like a long-lost sweetheart. When the smoke began to draw he gave a long, deep sigh, and the bristles of his gray-red moustache curled down over the cigar like the talons of an eagle. Slowly the red faded from the whites of his eyes. He fixed his gaze dreamily upon the hills across the river. The minutes came and went.
“‘Bout time to go now,” said Tony. “That damn-a Corrigan he be in the reever very quick.”
Burney started out of his trance with a grunt. He turned his head and gazed with a surprised and pained severity at his accomplice. He took the cigar partly from his mouth, but sucked it back again immediately, chewed it lovingly once or twice, and spoke, in virulent puffs, from the corner of his mouth:
“What is it, ye yaller haythen? Would ye lay contrivances against the enlightened races of the earth, ye instigator of illegal crimes? Would ye seek to persuade Martin Burney into the dirty tricks of an indecent Dago? Would ye be for murderin’ your benefactor, the good man that gives ye food and work? Take that, ye punkin-coloured assassin!”
The torrent of Burney’s indignation carried with it bodily assault. The toe of his shoe sent the would-be cutter of ropes tumbling from his seat.
Tony arose and fled. His vendetta he again relegated to the files of things that might have been. Beyond the boat he fled and away-away; he was afraid to remain.
Burney, with expanded chest, watched his late coplotter disappear. Then he, too, departed, setting his face in the direction of the Bronx.
In his wake was a rank and pernicious trail of noisome smoke that brought peace to his heart and drove the birds from the roadside into the deepest thickets.