and back again.  When she turned off into the homeward stretch on Outagamie Street there always slunk after her some stoop-shouldered, furtive, loping youth.  But he never was seen with her on Grand Avenue.  She had often been up before old Judge Colt for some nasty business or other.  At such times the shabby office of the Justice of the Peace would be full of shawled mothers and heavy-booted, work-worn fathers, and an aunt or two, and some cousins, and always a slinking youth fumbling with the hat in his hands, his glance darting hither and thither, from group to group, but never resting for a moment within any one else’s gaze.  Of all these present, the Kearney girl herself was always the calmest.  Old Judge Colt meted out justice according to his lights.  Unfortunately, the wearing of a yellow badge on the breast was a custom that had gone out some years before.

This nymph it was who had taken a fancy to Buzz Werner.  It looked very black for his future.

The strange part of it was that the girl possessed little attraction for Buzz.  It was she who made all the advances.  Buzz had sprung from very decent stock, as you shall see.  And something about the sultry unwholesomeness of this girl repelled him, though he was hardly aware that this was so.  Buzz and his gang would meet down town of a Saturday night, very moist as to hair and clean as to soft shirt.  They would lounge on the corner of Grand and Outagamie, in front of Schroeder’s brightly lighted drug store, watching the girls go by.  They were, for the most part, a pimply-faced lot.  They would shuffle their feet in a slow jig, hands in pockets.  When a late comer joined them it was considered au fait to welcome him by assuming a fistic attitude, after the style of the pugilists pictured in the barber-shop magazines, and spar a good-natured and make-believe round with him, with much agile dancing about in a circle, head held stiffly, body crouching, while working a rapid and facetious right.

This corner, or Donovan’s pool-shack, was their club, their forum.  Here they recounted their exploits, bragged of their triumphs, boasted of their girls, flexed their muscles to show their strength.  And all through their talk there occurred again and again a certain term whose use is common to their kind.  Their remarks were prefaced and interlarded and concluded with it, so that it was no longer an oath or a blasphemy.

“Je’s, I was sore at ’m.  I told him where to get off at.  Nobody can talk to me like that.  Je’s, I should say not.”

So accustomed had it grown that it was not even thought of as profanity.

If Buzz’s family could have heard him in his talk with his street-corner companions they would not have credited their ears.  A mouthy braggart in company is often silent in his own home, and Buzz was no exception to this rule.  Fortunately, Buzz’s braggadocio carried with it a certain conviction.  He never kept a job more than a month, and his own account of his leave-taking was always as vainglorious as it was dramatic.