The malign eye was worn proudly as a badge of honour, so proudly that the wearer, after Winona's first outcry of horror, bubbled vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma by stepping into one of Spike Brennon's straight lefts.

Nothing less than that! Winona, conceiving that this talk was meant to describe an accident of the most innocent character, demanded further details; wishing to be told what a straight left was; why a person named Spike Brennon kept such things about; and how Wilbur had been so careless as to step into one.

She instinctively pictured a straight left to be something like an open door into which the victim had stepped in the dark.

Her enlightenment was appalling.

When the boy had zestfully pictured with pantomime of the most informing sort she not only knew what a straight left was, but she knew that Wilbur Cowan, in stepping into one--in placing himself where by any chance he could step into one--had flung off the ultimate restraint of decency.
It amounted to nothing less, she gathered, than that her charge had formed a sinister alliance with a degraded prize-fighter, a low bully who for hire and amid the foulest surroundings pandered to the basest instincts of his fellowmen by disgusting exhibitions of brute force.