Читать книгу The Doomington Wanderer - Louis Golding - Страница 9

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It was that same night that Sailor Mason and Black Tom got drunk together, for the first time and not the last time. They had money to burn, and they burned it. They had an agreement to make, and they sealed it. There was a shade of grey in Mason’s whiteness and Tom’s blackness by the time they reached Dexter’s meadow, on the outskirts of Richmond, and staggered into the caravan.

A week or two later the establishment set out for New York. Not much is known of what happened during the next five years, beyond the fact that Tom Molyneux, endowed by nature with the strength of an ox and by Mason with the technique of Bristol, met a number of stout men and beat them, and so called himself, or Mason called him, “Champion of America.” No bruiser was found stout enough, on the other side of the Atlantic, to unnail those black colours from the mast. The pair earned a great deal of money, and Mason drank it away as fast as they earned it. Molyneux, too, got drunk now and again; but he could stand it, just as an oak-tree can stand being deluged by storms and come out smiling in all its leaves when the sun shines again. Mason could not stand it so well. It led him once or twice into a foolishness of which he repented very bitterly. Or why, even now, when there was a sudden loud knock at the door, a sudden hand clapped on his shoulder, did his face go green with terror?