Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/373

361 sailor and his wife. The two men raised their voices in a sudden quarrel; and then the sailor, clenching an indignant fist, swung an upper-cut on the villain's chin and felled him. Immediately Mickey crowed and cackled. "'D yuh see him jab 'm?" he cried to his father. "Gee! Did n't he hand him a beaut!"

His father grinned, rubbing the reddish bristle on his unshaven chin. She wouldn't be able to make a mother's "Willie" of that boy.

Then the comic Irishman developed unexpected powers as a hypnotist—not only hypnotizing, a whole man in an instant, but paralyzing an arm or a leg by merely drawing his fingers down the limb and waving a hand over it. Little Mickey tittered—giggled—shook—and screamed with laughter. The villain took another excruciating punch in the eye. A half-dozen plots of love and secret marriage, robbery and pursuit, tangled, themselves inextricably together, with every knot a tableau. And when the curtain fell on the end of the act, the villain had sworn thrice, horribly, to have revenge; the captain of the gang had undertaken a dangerous robbery; the sailor's young wife was pursued by the villain because he had learned of a secret will by which she was made the heiress of the old miser's fortune; and the comic Irishman had shown a promising ability to be always in the wrong place at the right moment to frustrate villainy and rescue virtue.

Mickey gazed unseeingly at the curtain, gloating over the recollection of it all. His father had gone downstairs to get a "drink"; and this fact added, in