Steve grinned back and went on out. He went down to the telegraph office, next door to the Izzard Hotel, pausing for a moment on the sidewalk to look at a glowing, cream-colored Vauxhall-Velox roadster that stood at the curb – as out of place in this grimy factory town as a harlequin opal in a grocer’s window.
In the doorway of the telegraph office Steve paused again, abruptly.
Behind the counter was a girl in tan flannel – the girl he had nearly run down twice the previous afternoon – the “Vallance girl” who had refrained from adding to justice’s account against Steve Threefall. In front of the counter, leaning over it, talking to her with every appearance of intimacy was one of the two men he had seen from the staircase window half an hour before – the slender dandy in gray who had slapped the other’s face and threatened him with an automatic.
The girl looked up, recognised Steve, and stood very erect. He took off his hat, and advanced smiling.
“I’m awfully sorry about yesterday,” he said. “I’m a crazy fool when I -“
“Do you wish to send a telegram?” she asked frigidly.
“Yes,” Steve said; “I also wish to -“
“There are blanks and pencils on the desk near the window,” and she turned her back on him.
Steve felt himself colouring, and since he was one of the men who habitually grin when at a loss, he grinned now, and found himself looking into the dark eyes of the man in gray.
That one smiled back under his little brown moustache, and said:
“Quite a time you had yesterday.”
“Quite,” Steve agreed, and went to the table the girl had indicated. He wrote his telegram:
Henry Harris
Harris Hotel, Whitetufts:
Arrived right side up, but am in hock. Wire me two hundred dollars. Will be back Saturday.
Threefall. T.
But he did not immediately get up from the desk. He sat there holding the piece of paper in his fingers, studying the man and girl, who were again engaged in confidential conversation over the counter. Steve studied the girl most.
She was quite a small girl, no more than five feet in height, if that; and she had that peculiar rounded slenderness which gives a deceptively fragile appearance. Her face was an oval of skin whose fine whiteness had thus far withstood the grimy winds of Izzard; her nose just missed being upturned, her violet-black eyes just missed being too theatrically large, and her black-Brown hair just missed being too bulky for the small head it crowned; but in no respect did she miss being as beautiful as a figure from a Monticelli canvas.
All these things Steve Threefall, twiddling his telegram in sun-brown fingers, considered and as he considered them he came to see the pressing necessity of having his apologies accepted. Explain it as you will – he carefully avoided trying to explain it to himself – the thing was there. One moment there was nothing, in the four continents he knew, of any bothersome importance to Steve Threefall; the next moment he was under an inescapable compulsion to gain the favour of this small person in tan flannel with brown ribbons at wrists and throat.
At this point the man in gray leaned farther over the counter, to whisper something to the girl. She flushed, and her eyes flinched. The pencil in her hand fell to the counter, and she picked it up with small fingers that were suddenly incongruously awkward. She made a smiling reply, and went on with her writing, but the smile seemed forced.
Steve tore up his telegram and composed another:
I made it, slept it off in the cooler, and I am going to settle here a while. There are things about the place I like. Wire my money and send my clothes to hotel here. Buy Whiting’s Ford from him as cheap as you can for me.
He carried the blank to the counter and laid it down.
The girl ran her pencil over it, counting the words.
“Forty-seven,” she said, in a tone that involuntarily rebuked the absence of proper telegraphic brevity.
“Long, but it’s all right,” Steve assured her. “I’m sending it collect.”
She regarded him icily.
“I can’t accept a collect message unless I know that the sender can pay for it if the addressee refuses it. It’s against the rules.”
‘You’d better make an exception this time,” Steve told her solemnly, “because if yon don’t you’ll have to lend me the money to pay for it.”
“I’ll have-?”
“You will,” he insisted. “You got me into this jam, and it’s up to you to help me get out. The Lord knows you’ve cost me enough as it is – nearly two hundred dollars! The whole thing was your fault.”
“My fault?”
“It was! Now I’m giving you a chance to square yourself. Hurry it off, please, because I’m hungry and I need a shave. I’ll be waiting on the bench outside.” And he spun on his heel and left the office.
One end of the bench in front of the telegraph office was occupied when Steve, paying no attention to the man who sat there, made himself comfortable on the other. He put his black stick between his legs and rolled a cigarette with thoughtful slowness, his mind upon the just completed scene in the office.
Why, he wondered, whenever there was some special reason for gravity, did he always find himself becoming flippant? Why, whenever he found himself face to face with a situation that was important, that meant something to him, did he slip uncontrollably into banter – play the clown? He lit his cigarette and decided scornfully – as he had decided a dozen times before – that it all came from a childish attempt to conceal his self-consciousness; that for all his thirty-three years of life and his eighteen years of rubbing shoulders with the world – its rough corners as well as its polished – he was still a green boy underneath – a big kid.
“A neat package you had yesterday,” the man who sat on the other end of the bench remarked.
“Yeah,” Steve admitted without turning his head. He supposed he’d be hearing about his crazy arrival as long as he stayed in Izzard.
“I reckon old man Denvir took you to the cleaner’s as usual?”
“Uh-huh!” Steve said, turning now for a look at the other.
He saw a very tall and very lean man in rusty brown, slouched down on the small of his back, angular legs thrust out across the sidewalk. A man past forty, whose gaunt, melancholy face was marked with lines so deep that they were folds in the skin rather than wrinkles. His eyes were the mournful chestnut eyes of a basset hound, and his nose was as long and sharp as a paper-knife. He puffed on a black cigar, getting from it a surprising amount of smoke, which he exhaled upward, his thin nose splitting the smoke into two gray plumes.
“Ever been to our fair young city before?” this melancholy individual asked next. His voice held a monotonous rhythm that was not unpleasant to the ear.
“No, this is my first time.”
The thin man nodded ironically.
“You’ll like it if you stay,” he said. “It’s very interesting.”
“What’s it all about?” Steve asked, finding himself mildly intrigued by his benchmate.
“Soda niter. You scoop it up off the desert, and boil and otherwise cook it, and sell it to fertilizer manufacturers, and nitric acid manufacturers, and any other kind of manufacturers who can manufacture something out of soda niter. The factory in which, for which, and from which you do all this lies yonder, beyond the railroad tracks.”
He waved a lazy arm down the street, to where a group of square concrete buildings shut out the desert at the end of the thoroughfare.
“Suppose you don’t play with this soda?” Steve asked, more to keep the thin man talking than to satisfy any thirst for local knowledge. “What do you do then?”
The thin man shrugged his sharp shoulders.
“That depends,” he said, “on who you are. If you’re Dave Brackett” – he wiggled a finger at the red bank across the street – “you gloat over your mortgages, or whatever it is a banker does; if you’re Grant Fernie, and too big for a man without being quite big enough for a horse, you pin a badge on your bosom and throw rough-riding strangers into the can until they sober up; or if you’re Larry Ormsby, and your old man owns the soda works, then you drive trick cars from across the pond” – nodding at the cream Vauxhall – “and spend your days pursuing beautiful telegraph operators. But I take it that you’re broke, and have just wired for money, and are waiting for the more or less doubtful results. Is that it?”