Gibraltar invulnerability; he continued to gaze challengingly around him until he began to realize
that wherever he looked, calculating eyes looked back.
“All right, all right,” he said roughly, “let’s get started.”
The ragged circle around him moved perceptibly closer.
“Let’s get going,” he yelled. “Come on, Finny. What’s first?”
Phineas had one of those minds which could record what is happening in the background and do
nothing about it because something else was preoccupying him. He seemed to sink deeper into
his list.
“Phineas!” Brinker pronounced his name with a maximum use of the teeth. “What is next?”
Still the sleek brown head bent mesmerized over the list.
“What’s the big hurry, Brinker?” someone from the tightening circle asked with dangerous
gentleness. “What’s the big rush?”
“We can’t stand here all day,” he blurted. “We’ve got to get started if we’re going to have this
damn thing. What’s next? Phineas!”
At last the recording in Finny’s mind reached its climax. He looked vaguely up, studied the
straddling, at-bay figure of Brinker at the core of the poised perimeter of boys, hesitated, blinked,
and then in his organ voice said good-naturedly, “Next? Well that’s pretty clear. You are.”
Chet released from his trumpet the opening, lifting, barbaric call of a bullfight, and the circle of
boys broke wildly over Brinker. He flailed back against the evergreens, and the jugs appeared to
spring out of the snow. “What the hell,” he kept yelling, off balance among the branches. “What
... the ... hell! ” By then his cider, which he had apparently expected to dole out according to his
own governing whim, was disappearing. There was going to be no government, even by whim,
even by Brinker’s whim, on this Saturday at Devon.
From a scramble of contenders I got one of the jugs, elbowed off a counterattack, opened it,
sampled it, choked, and then went through with my original plan by stopping Brinker’s mouth
with it. His eyes bulged, and blood vessels in his throat began to pulsate, until at length I lowered
the jug.
He gave me a long, pondering look, his face closed and concentrating while behind it his mind
plainly teetered between fury and hilarity; I think if I had batted an eye he would have hit me.
The carnival’s breaking apart into a riot hung like a bomb between us. I kept on looking
expressionlessly back at him until beneath a blackening scowl his mouth opened enough to fire
out the words, “I’ve been violated.”