Page:Bad Girl (1929).pdf/14

 through yellow straws to the moist and smiling lips of bobbed-haired damsels. Cigarettes gleamed in the darkness, and here and there an adventurous maiden bared white knees to the cool air. The flat-dwellers of New York were forgetting factory and office in the tolerant laws of the gold and white Burma.

Eddie Collins stood at the rail of the boat with his back to the water. Both hands were in his pockets, and across one arm a woman's cape, a frail black wisp of silk, trailed dejectedly.

He scanned the faces of the laughing couples who drifted past him, and on his own face was a confession of anger that simmered darkly within him.

"Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main"—the unmusical voice had resumed its chant, and Collins turned toward the rail and looked down into the glimmering river. He was very young. His hair was a sandy, disorderly crown, for he scoffed at the pomades that brought hard and shiny tidiness to the hair of the other youths. Collins' eyes were blue. They were sharply questioning eyes that proclaimed a keen intelligence that still groped blackly and unsatisfied within itself. The line of his chin was strong and firm. It was a chin that had taken blows and had proudly thrust itself upward at knowing the man who could give them. His mouth was large. There was a suggestion of obstinacy in his lips.

Somewhere a girl screamed with laughter. Eddie Collins clenched his jaws, and his eyes became hard blue chinks. The laughing girl's voice was raised now in mocking supplication. "Oh, Billy, ple-ease. I just combed my hair."

More laughter. Other voices mingled with the girl's. Eddie Collins spat contemptuously. "God-damn fools," he said.

An adventurous breeze sprang up from the river and in