Page:Arthur Stringer-The Loom of Destiny.djvu/77

Life's Loaded Die dime in the house, that he might cheer his drooping spirits with another drop or two of Holland gin. Timmie himself, in his infancy, it must be confessed, had been a silent and sickly baby, with his mother's meek grey eyes and an inordinate love for a certain tattered and bodiless old rag doll. It was this disappointment in his son and heir, Timmie's father stoutly protested, that had first driven him to drink.

But if Timmie's progenitor had at first beheld these things with undisguised anger and disgust, he vigorously undertook the child's reformation, almost, in fact, before he was weaned. The boy was taught, by the time he was able to walk, how to guard, feint, clinch, and break away. At the same time he was in the habit of showing him, in a way that made poor Timmie's mother weep for many an anxious hour, how a Sharkey should be able to stand punishment.

So by the time Timmie was old enough to venture into the open street he was master of his two childish fists, and what was more, he knew it. That knowledge is a 65