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By Root 10371 0

’s arm and started to shove him. Old Man O’Brien had been in the drug store, and he’d taken the whole show in. He got sore as a boil and stepped up to the lousy flatfoot. He told him where to get off at in regular he-man’s language. He said he was the kind of a father these boys had, and what was there to say about it? And he told MacNamara that those boys would stand on the corner as long as they pleased, and as long as they were behaving, as they had been then, no one would try and bully them... not while he was around. And no cop could think that he was going to get away with pushing his son. And he told the damn bluecoat that if he would take off his star, he’d punch him all over the corner, and when he got through, wipe the street with him. MacNamara had walked away like a whipped dog, mumbling apologies. If he had cracked a wise one, Old Man O’Brien would have socked him. And if he had run Old Man O’Brien in, with Mr. O’Brien being in the right like he was, well, he would have been in a jam, because Old Man O’Brien had money and a pull. Studs and all the guys had wished they had an old man like Johnny had. Now, riding in the car, Studs thought what a swell old man he was. He remembered Johnny saying his dad never once hit him. And he gave Johnny plenty of spending money. He was a real old man, all right.

They drove down South Park Avenue. Old Man O’Brien said he’d take Studs and Johnny to White City some time. He and his wife had been there only last week, and had had a dandy time. Studs felt that Mr. O’Brien was different from his own gaffer. He wasn’t a putter-off, but when he said he’d do something, he did it. Old Man O’Brien turned, and said:

“Hell, you kids ain’t as tough as kids used to be in my days. When we fought then, we fought. And we all had to use brass knuckles.”

“You wouldn’t fool us, Gov’nor, would you?” kidded Johnny.

Studs thought it wasn’t every guy who could kid with his old man, like Johnny could. Most old men were, like his own, always serious, and always demanding that you show them respect and listen to everything they said, and never contradict them or think they were in the wrong. And they never understood a kid.

Johnny had some old man, all right.

“Yeh, and when I was a kid, we used to fight Indians, and if we made a slip then, well, we’d have been tommy-hawked.”

“No!” Studs exclaimed with surprise. He knew what old man O’Brien said couldn’t be true, and yet he half-believed it was. He had an imaginary picture of Mr. O’Brien wading through a field of Indians, throwing a whole tribe of them up for grabs.

“Yeah, I was once near tommy-hawked at the place where White City now stands.”

“He’s always trying to bunk a guy,” Johnny said.

“That’s the trouble with this kid of mine. He never believes anything I say,” Mr. O’Brien said.

He turned and smiled good-naturedly at them. In the moment that he turned, the car swerved, and he had a narrow escape from hitting a rattling Ford.

He got sore, and cursed after the other driver, telling him to take his junk in the alley where it belonged, and to try riding a bicycle until he learned how to drive.

“They ought to prohibit those goddamn Fords from being driven in the streets. They are nothing but a pile of junk.”

“They are automobile fleas,” Johnny said.

Studs told a joke he had read in a Ford joke book. A rag man was going down the alley one day, and he was called in a back yard. The man who called him said how much will you give me for this, and he pointed to a Ford. The rag man looked, and he looked some more. Then he said vel if you give me five dollair, I’ll take it avay for you. They laughed at the joke. Old Man O’Brien said it was a pretty good one.

Old Man O’Brien spoke of the good old days, gone by, of the Washington Park racetrack, with its Derby day in the middle of June and the huge crowds it attracted, its eighty acres, its race course with a gentle slope from east and north that made it a faster track than a dead level one, its artificial lakes and garden works on the inner sides of the main track, its triple deck stands, its