Evening Star Newspaper, December 23, 1934, Page 76

Wustrated By JOE KING He was moving, slowly but inexorably, on Benny Santer. Nora Doran was forced to step back. “Don’s—oh, please!” she cried. “Don’t make trouble heve, logger!” HE dock lamps were glimmering through a rainy dusk when Scarry Gallivan came ashore from his power boat. He tramped swiftly through four dark warehouse and factory blocks, then his way came to life. A traffic light was a glistening red eye in the blowing rain. The cross traffic glared and roared before him. The street cars were packed with homing Yyworkers and shoppers. Gallivan, waiting, glimpsed tired but laughing faces through the misty windows. Even the straphangers had a shine about themselves and their armloads of bundles, holly wreaths and small spruce trees. Of course it was Christmas eve. The ideal of peace and good will was in its yearly bloom- ing. The homing faces were glowing with the revived ideal. The bells of glad tidings rang again in laughter. Scarry Gallivan, the tidewater logger, had come home. Home to the streets of Seattle's “Skidroad.” The building fronts and the signs in the block yonder lived for him like the faces of old friends. Batberg’s Employment Office. e=Putonen’s Eats House. Larsen's Elite Loggers’ Hotel. Uncle Ike's Pawnshop. The Valhalla Pool Hall. And, its windows flaring on the corner, Boratt's Club. The Skidroad was the home of homeless men, the refuge for loggers, miners, fishermen and ranch hands when in town from their hard labor and womanless camps in the wilderness. The Skidroad had been Scarry Gallivan's boyhood home. A water front waif, housed in a tideflat shanty, motherless, only in the saloon streets had the boy felt any glow from life. The traffic light changed. As the tidewater logger stared across at Boratt’s Club his scarred face was again like grooved iron. Life was his enemy. He was home to settle an account in that enmity. = = HE long bar in the front room of Boratt's Club was already lined three deep with men from the camps. A roar of chesty voices surged up with the clinking clatter of chunky glasses. Steam from the drying wool of mack- inaws lifted with drifts of tobacco smoke and fogged the ceiling lights. Men were riffling cards and stacking chips at the tables in the big back room. Boratt's was no place for Santa Claus. Scarry Gallivan's gaze cruised the tables and the rugged crowd. He halted a bottle-shouldered bouncer and casually asked, “Is Benny Santer dealin’ for Boratt again?” The answer was a suspicious headshake. Gallivan eased through a set of swinging “doors in a partition wall, tramped past an im- mense lunch counter and down two long rows of dining booths. Hé looked each set of diners over, and quizzed a waitress, “Don’t Benny eat hcre—Benny Santer?” “He wears whiskers on his name if he does,” the girl said. Two other Boratt employes refused any kind of answer. The logger swung back to the bar room and tramped deliberately to a box of an office at the head of the bar. He uttered his name in a tone of voice that fairly chopped through the panels. The door inched open. A slice of mottled jowl, a bulging, bloodshot eye, were revealed. “You gotta gall, Scarry,” growied Butch Boratt. “Juh think the cops’ll take you for Santa Claus?” “They ought to.” said the logger. “After I've put a choker on Benny Santer, anyhow. That will be a gift to all humanity.” “Santer high-tailed for Frisco soon as he was unjugged.” Boratt’s growl became an earnest wheeze, vibrant and hoarse. “Lookit, Scarry,” he coaxed. “I can't stand for no killin’. I'll kick through with a grand, you lay off Benny, go back to the woods and stay there. That's good heart balm, a grand, aint it? Be a good fellah, Scarry.” “So he is in town,” rasped Gallivan. “Just where at?” “You dumbwitted ape!"” Boratt tried con- tempt. “You'd rope your neck over a woman? What's eatin’ you? There's plenty of women. That's what Benny thought. He never dreamed you'd go so nuts over a o “Don’t use words careless,” Gallivan chopped in. He footed the door open wider. His eyes suddenly blazed like beads of heated steel. “Benny played foul,” he rasped on. “He demeaned me with—with her. Called me a timber beast, a water hog. Made wisecracks like—I bet he stirs his coffee with his thumb,’ he'd say. ‘Combs his head with a crosscut saw. Eats hay, if it's got whisky on it I was a iaugh to him, finally to her.” Disgust at his own passion gripped the tide- water man. He was suddenly chilled steel again. “Boratt,” he said, long-swinging each word, “maybe I'm a timber beast. Anyhow, I've got nothin’ to lose. I'm gettin’ Benny Santer. Tell me where to get him, and the law will never have a word from me about you and the rum boats. You'd just better tell me, Boratt.” ALLIVAN was raising his immense voice. A greenish hue appeared in the Boratt mottles and they quivered with mute appeal. Then: “I'm shippin’ Benny to Frisco,” breathed Boratt. “He's takin' a midnight hoat. Right now he oughtta be at the lady barber shop, third door to right from here—Nora & Thora on the window. Don't,” implored Boratt, “tip him I double-crossed him. Benny's got friends.” Boratt's bulging eyes stared fearfully out at the bottle-shouldered bouncer. The bouncer’s scowl was more blackly suspicious than ever. Gallivan boomed, “mighty sorry Benny beat it,” and swung away from Boratt. He drifted easily from the club and tramped on through the rzin for the lady barber shop. The blind of the window was drawn but a soft glimmer trickled through at the edges. The door was unlocked. ‘The logger quietly opened the door. The lights were off in the room, but in the back a glow shone from a small Christmas tree. Two figures were silhouetted there, those of a small slip of a girl and a thin man in a belted rain- THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER 23, 1934. AIRCUT By JAMES STEVENS Back to the Skidroad roared Scarry Gallivan, thirsting for revenge— but he met a girl, and he heard a song. . . . coat. The man was Benny Santer. He was talking. “I'm through kiddin'* Benny said, crunch- ing out the words like bits of glass. “Get into your raglan baby. We'll eat at Boratt's, and Butch himself can inform you what will happen if you don't play pretty.” “1 won't'™ the girl's voice shrilled. “I won't, won't, won's!" “I told you to cut the squawkin'.” Benny Santer darted a bony hand across the soft col- ored glow of the tree and hooked the girl's arm, She gasped with pain. “Gives you a thrill, hey, baby?” Benny grinned. “Well, that awn't nothin’ at all—" Benny whipped around as the door boit clicked. Gallivan had closed the door quietly. With the click he was ready, his right hand ominously bulging a mackinaw pocket. Benny Santer was still, his lean face waxen in the dim glow. a sudden glisten of sweat on his forehead. HE girl moved slowly out toward Gallivan. He halted half way down the room, watch- ing her. She was small and slender, delicate and dark against the soft color of the littie lights and the sparkling tree. “We're closed,” she said steadily. you want?” “Why,” drawled Gallivan, “a Christmas hair- cut. I'm a timber beast, a curly wolf with bark on him instead of hair. Hey. Benny?" “Who—who tipped—you?” Benny choked out each word. “What could you mean, Benny?"” Gallivan's easy speech was rich with innocent wonder, “Why, I just needed me a Christmas haircut, I only dropped in here, lucky like, and you seem so surprised. Why, Benny, you even seem to be mad at the sight of me. You make me feel hurt——" “What's in your “Spit it out, Scarry.” “Have you got any hay around, lady bar- ber?” drawled Gallivan to the girl. “You know, I eat hay, if it's got whisky on it.” He was moving, slowly but inexorably, on Benny Santer. Nora Doran was forced to step back. A cast of the tree glow struck full in Gallivan’s eyes. In them she saw the heat of murder. Benny cringed behind her. “Don’t—oh, please!” she cried to him plead- ingly. “Don’t make trouble here, logger—I've already had so much—and you heard what Benny threatened. The cops will ruin me at a word from Boratt.” Gallivan halted. “I didn't figure to make trouble here,” he said. “I only want to make sure Benny has no hot iron on him, and then we'll take a walk. A water front walk,” Galli- van grimly added. The girl still stood in his way. “Ah, listen!"” she breathed. Fresh sounds were surging in with the traffic roar. The mellow piping of an organ from a street meeting truck. Children singing the old, old songs of the season. The melody came nearer on the cold night air. “All about peace and good will,” said Nora Doran eagerly. “You can’'t mean—what I see in your eyes. Not tonight.” “Why, miss,” said Gallivan innocently. “What could you be talkin' about?” “Ah, let Benny go,” she begged. “Please be a good egg. Come on, logger,” she coaxed. “Let him go, and then I'll give you a Christmas hair- cut—free.” She was drifting close, too close. Gallivan stood like a pine, coldly considering what he had to do. He had promised to protect Boratt, he wanted Benny to believe that he had come into the shop by accident. And he was sud- denly curious to know what grip Boratt and Benny Santer had on this slip of a girl, “I'll have that haircut,” Gallivan said. “Take a seat, Benny, front of the chair, where I can look at you.” “What do craw?” Benny snarled. ENNY SANTER made no argument, seeming satisfied with his reprieve. Obeying Galli- van’s order, he made a weak-kneed walk toward the front of the shop and sagged down in one of a row of chairs. Scarry sat down, keeping ar eye fixed on Benny Santer. A switch clicked. White light flooded the mackinawed logger, blotted out the glow of the small tree. Nora Doran moved between Galli- van and the window. She gazed at the blank biind, but her eyes were rapt as she listened to the organ and the carol. A boy's. voice was singing alone now, a voice of such pure clarity that it was unearthly. A street car crashed by. The girl started, and turned to Gallivan. Her small face, glow= ing with that strange light, her dark eyes so large and shining, lent her an aspect as angelic as the sound of the carol. 80 Scarry Gallivan was caught in the spell of illusion. It was a wonder to him he had never known the like before. He lost some of it, but not all. as Nora Doran flipped an apron over his shoulders. “Christmas haircut,” he drawled. “Done to sweet music by a lady barber, and with the handsome boy gambler for an audience. 1it's like a show. Somehow I feel that way. But in shows people talk. Do you mind listenin’ to me some, Benny?” Benny's hard black eyes only glittered from his stony face. “Go right on workin’ on me,” said Gallivan heartily as the click-click paused. It started again. “You know, I hadn’t thought anything about the season till I cruised in here. It was only a bitter time to me when I was a kid. These other years it was just a matter of run- nin’ rafts of Christmas booze down the Sound to Butch Boratt. “Last year that was out. I had an honest job, a new home, and a wonderful girl. She wanted to be married on Christmas. Or she did, until——" Gallivan paused, to force a grin. “Well,” he said, “I went home like Santa Claus, with an empty sack,” ; Outside a hoarse voice was yammering in exhortation. The bright spell ebbed from t.r_ne shop. Gallivan saw it as very much a skid road barber shop, a place where womanless men from the camps sought ease from their hunger for the touch of feminine hands. “I wish the boy would sing again,” she said, working on. “If you could know what it did for me last Christmas. I was just like you, logger, everything gone empty on me. All set for a wedding trip to San Francisco, and an- other girl made the trip. You'll know how it hit me when I say I started down to the docks for a finish in bottom water. That gospel truck stopped me. The boy singing. I listened. I heard the bells—" She was silent, under the threat that blazed from Benny Santer’s eyes. The scissors clicked on jerkily. Gallivan felt the girl’s hands trem- bling, and he thought he understood. He flung out his left hand and gripped her arm. His voice rasped: “It was Benny,” he said. “And I could name the girl. Let's talk straight. What has he on you?” Gallivan savagely leaned out, tearing the apron from his neck, scowling at Benny. “Myself, I was no good. A skid road kid. a log pirate. rum-runner, as bad as any on tide- water. But I was workin’ honest for her, I've proved my faith by keepin’ honest since—ah, the hell with it. It's talk enough. I'm here to blast you.” “Not here,” Nora Doran implored. tonight—listen!™ “Oh, not THE boy was singing again. His voice lifted miraculously on a thin, high note. Even the roar of the street seemed to pause for it, until the sweet tone whispered away in its flight to the stars. With it Nora Doran drifted before Scarry Gallivan. She was rapt and ex- alted again, her hands clasped against her breast. “We must be forgiving,” said Nora Doran, in that vibrant chanting voice. ‘“Make an end to the hard hate in your heart, and a welcome t0 the music of forgiveness in your soul.” She was done, letting him hear the unearthly voice soar to the stars. The hard, hot purpose that had brought Scarry Gallivan here melted apart. It welled to his throat, throbbed in his head. “You can go,” spoke Scarry Gallivan to Benny Santer, and wrenched out of his throat :he rest that he had to say. “Forgiven,” he said. Benny shot the bolt and darted out, but halted as another figure filled the doorway beside him. The bottle-shouldered bouncer from Boratt's peered inside. “All okay, Benny?" he said. Benny skipped behind him. “Not so okay,” he chirped, swiftly recovering. “Jeez, that ape almost had me. Would of, if the kid hadn't pulled her play.” He called over Bottle Shoulders, “Meet you on the Frisco boat, baby, if you know what's good for baby.” The two vanished. The door slammed. Scarry Gallivan stared dully at the girl. She had slumped weakly against another chair. “It was a play, logger,” she said harshly. “That sing-song used to be my racket. I've gotta go back to it. With Benny. You'd better go home.” “Timber beast.” said Scarry Gallivan, with & twisted smile. “So easy I can be coaxed to eat hay. But I'd like to know just one thing more. What can Butch Boratt do to you if you don’t play with Benny?" “Plenty. The cops take his orders, and my record is not so good.” “But you've worked here for a year,” Gallivan Continued on Fifteenth Page