“Sure. They called him the Bone-Crushing Swede—he used to come there all the time.”
“Yeah, that’s him. He used to wrastle all over the country—he was way up there, one of the best in the business. The Ole Man wrastled him three times, an’ throwed him once, too!”
“And that big fellow they called the Strangler Turk----”
“Yeah, an’ he was good, too! Only he wasn’t no Turk—he only called hisself one. The Ole Man told me he was some kind of Polack or Bohunk from the steel mills out in Pennsylvania, an’ that’s how he got so strong.”
“And the Jersey Giant----”
“Yeah----”
“And Cyclone Finnegan----”
“Yeah----”
“And Bull Dakota—and Texas Jim Ryan—and the Masked Marvel? Do you remember the Masked Marvel?”
“Yeah—only there was a whole lot of them—guys cruisin’ all over the country callin’ theirselves the Masked Marvel. The Ole Man wrastled two of ‘em. Only the real Masked Marvel never came to town. The Ole Man told me there was a real Masked Marvel, but he-was too damn good, I guess, to come to Libya Hill.”
“Do you remember the night, Bras, up at the old City Auditorium, when your father was wrestling one of these Masked Marvels, and we were there in the front row rooting for him, and he got a strangle hold on this fellow with the mask, and the mask came off—and the fellow wasn’t the Masked Marvel at all, but only that Greek who used to work all night at the Bijou Café for Ladies and Gents down by the depot?”
“Yeah—haw-haw!” Nebraska threw back his head and laughed loudly. “I’d clean fergot that damn Greek, but that’s who it was! The whole crowd hollered frame-up an’ tried to git their money back—I’ll swear, Monk! I’m glad to see you!” He put his big brown hand on his companion’s knee. “It don’t seem no time, does it? It all comes back!”
“Yes, Bras”—for a moment George looked out at the flashing landscape with a feeling of sadness and wonder in his heart—“it all comes back.”
George sat by the window and watched the stifled land stroke past him. It was unseasonably hot for September, there had been no rain for weeks, and all afternoon the contours of the eastern seaboard faded away into the weary hazes of the heat. The soil was parched and dusty, and under a glazed and burning sky coarse yellow grasses and the withered stalks of weeds simmered and flashed beside the tracks. The whole continent seemed to be gasping for its breath. In the hot green depths of the train a powder of fine cinders beat in through the meshes of the screens, and during the pauses at stations the little fans at both ends of the car hummed monotonously, with a sound that seemed to be the voice of the heat itself. During these intervals when the train stood still, enormous engines steamed slowly by on adjacent tracks, or stood panting, passive as great cats, and their engineers wiped wads of blackened waste across their grimy faces, while the passengers fanned feebly with sheaves of languid paper or sat in soaked and sweltering dejection.
For a long time George sat alone beside his window. His eyes took in every detail of the changing scene, but his thoughts were turned inward, absorbed in recollections which his meeting with Nebraska Crane had brought alive again. The great train pounded down across New Jersey, across Pennsylvania, across the tip of Delaware, and into Maryland. The unfolding panorama of the land was itself like a sequence on the scroll of time. George felt lost and a little sick. His talk with his boyhood friend had driven him back across the years. The changes in Nebraska and his quiet acceptance of defeat had added an undertone of sadness to the vague, uneasy sense of foreboding which he had got from his conversation with the banker, the politician, and the Mayor.
At Baltimore, when the train slowed to a stop in the gloom beneath the station, he caught a-momentary glimpse of a face on the platform as it slid past his window. All that he could see was a blur of thin, white features and a sunken mouth, but at the corners of the mouth he thought he also caught the shadow of a smile—faint, evil, ghostly—and at sight of it a sudden and unreasoning terror seized him. Could that be Judge Rumford Bland?