He took out his handkerchief and wiped the blood and dust from his face, brushed and adjusted his disarranged clothing as well as he could, then climbed into the car and by a roundabout route made his way back to town.
His first visit was to a Turkish bath where he attempted to have some of the soreness rubbed from his battered frame. Then he visited one of the facial artists who make a specialty of painting black eyes into some semblance of flesh color.
In this way he managed to efface the worst traces of the afternoon’s encounter, though his face still remained somewhat swelled and puffy. Then he set out to make a night of it and drown his troubles in the way with which he was the most familiar.
He was seated at a table in a crowded café patronized chiefly by gamblers, when he was accosted by a friend whose dissipated face showed that he was of the same type as Fleming.
“Hello, old man,” said the former. “Drinking here all by your lonesome?”
“How are you, Bixby,” responded Fleming. “Sit down here and have something with me.”
His friend did so and Fleming motioned to the waiter and ordered a couple of drinks.
“Why, what’s the matter with your face, Fleming?” asked Bixby, as he looked at his friend curiously. “Been in a scrap?”
“Nothing like that,” lied Fleming in a surly tone. “Ran a car into a ditch and had an upset.”
“Doesn’t improve your beauty any,” laughed his friend lightly. “Still, you can’t kick if you’ve come out of a smash with nothing worse than that. What are you doing here in Boston, anyway? Come over to see the game?”
“They say Matson is going to pitch to-morrow,” Bixby continued.
Fleming greeted the mention of the name with a lurid outburst that left no doubt as to his feelings.
“You seem to be horribly sore,” he ventured. “I thought that like most New Yorkers you’d be rooting for him to win.”
“I hope they knock him out of the box,” Fleming hissed, with the venom of a snake.
“There are lots of people in Boston hoping the same thing,” replied Bixby. “But I think they’re due to be disappointed. It isn’t often they send that boy back to the shower.”
“He can be beaten like any one else,” snarled Fleming, his gorge rising as he heard Joe praised.
“Sure,” conceded Bixby. “The best of them have an off day at times. But they say he’s in splendid shape just now. That arm of his is certainly a dandy.”