He was, as may be seen, a figure of some importance in the community, not only as a captain of police, but as a sort of local prophet. The newspaper was constantly interviewing him about all kinds of things—changes in weather, prospects for a cold Winter, a hot Summer, or a killing frost, a state of drought, or an excess of rain. He always had an answer ready, and he rarely failed.
Finally—and this, of course, made his person memorably heroic to the boys—he had at one time in his life been a professional wrestler (a good one too; at one time, it was said, “the champion of the South”), and although he was now approaching fifty, he occasionally consented to appear in local contests, and give an exhibition of his prowess. There had been one thrilling Winter, just a year or two before, when Mr. Crane, during the course of a season, had met a whole series of sinister antagonists—Masked Marvels, Hidden Menaces, Terrible Turks, Mighty Swedes, Demon Dummies, and all the rest of them.
George Webber remembered all of them; Nebraska had always taken him on passes which his father gave him. The thought of the very approach of these evenings was enough to put the younger boy into a fever of anticipation, a frenzy of apprehension, an agonized unrest. He could not understand how Mr. Crane or Nebraska could face one of these occasions, with all of its terrible moments of conflict, victory or defeat, injury or mutilation, broken bones or fractured ligaments, with no more perturbation than they would show when sitting down to eat their evening meal.
And yet it was true! These people—son and father both—seemed to have come straight from the heart of immutable and unperturbed nature. Warmth they had, staunch friendliness, and the capacity for savage passion, ruthless murder. But they had no more terror than a mountain. Nerve they had, steel nerve; but as for the cold anguish of the aching and constricted pulse, the dry, hard ache and tightness of the throat, the hollow numbness of the stomach pit, the dizzy lightness of the head, the feeling of an unreal buoyancy before the moment of attack—they seemed to know no more about these things than if they had been made of oak!
Time after time on days when Mr. Crane was due to wrestle at the City Auditorium, the boy had watched him pass the house. Time after time he had searched the policeman’s square-cut face for signs of anguish or tension to see if the strange, hard features showed any sign of strain, if the square, hard jaw was grimly clenched, the hard eyes worried, if there were any signs of fear, disorder, apprehension in his step, his look, his tone, his movement, or his greeting. There was none. The policeman never varied by a jot. A powerful, somewhat shambling figure of a man, a little under six feet tall, with a thick neck, coarsely seamed and weathered with deep scorings, long arms, big hands, gorillalike shoulders, and a kind of shambling walk, a little baggy at the knees—a figure of an immense but rather worn power—he passed by in his somewhat slouchy uniform, seamed down the trouser-legs with stripes of gold, turned in at his house and mounted the front porch steps, with no more excitement than he would show on any other day of the week. And yet the male population of the whole town would be buzzing with excited speculation on the outcome of the match, and the hearts of boys would thud with apprehensive expectation at the very thought of it.
Later on, when dark had come, a half hour or so before the time scheduled for the match, Mr. Crane would leave his house, bearing underneath his arm a bundle wrapped up in a newspaper, which contained his old wrestling trunks and shoes; and with the same deliberate, even, bag-kneed stride, turn his steps in the direction of the town and the City Auditorium—and, Great God! his approaching and now terribly imminent encounter with the Bone-Crushing Swede, the Masked Marvel, or the Strangler Turk!
A few minutes later Nebraska would come by Monk’s house and whistle piercingly; the Webber boy would rush out of the house and down the steps still gulping scalding coffee down his aching throat—and then the two of them would be off on their way to town!
What nights they were—the nights of smoke-smell, stillness, and the far-off barking of a dog, a fire of oak leaves at the corner, and the leaping fire-dance of the boys around it—great nights of the approaching contest of the wrestlers, the nights of frost and menace, joy and terror—and October!