Registering at the hotel they had selected, he scanned the page of the book given over to the previous day’s business. “Mrs. H. H. Moore,” the name she was to have used, did not appear thereon. Discreet inquiries revealed that she had not arrived.
Sending his baggage up to his room, Carter went out and called at the two other hotels in the town. She was at neither. At a newsstand he bought an armful of New York papers. Nothing about her arrest was in them. She had not been picked up before leaving the city, or the newspapers would have made much news of her.
For three days he clung obstinately to the belief that she had not run away from him. He spent the three days in his New York rooms, his ears alert for the ringing of the telephone bell, examining his mail frantically, constantly expecting the messenger, who didn’t come. Occasionally he sent telegrams to the hotel in the upstate town – futile telegrams.
Then he accepted the inescapable truth: she had decided – perhaps had so intended all along – not to run the risk incidental to a meeting with him, but had picked out a hiding place of her own; she did not mean to fulfil her obligations to him, but had taken his assistance and gone.
Another day passed in idleness while he accustomed himself to the bitterness of this knowledge. Then he set to work to salvage what he could. Fortunately, it seemed to be much. The bare story that the girl had told him over the remains of her meal could with little effort be woven into a novelette that should be easily marketed. Crook stories were always in demand, especially one with an authentic girl-burglar drawn from life.
As he bent over his typewriter, concentrating on his craft, his disappointment began to fade. The girl was gone. She had treated him shabbily, but perhaps it was better that way. The money she had cost him would come back with interest from the sale of the serial rights of this story. As for the personal equation: she had been beautiful, fascinating enough – and friendly – but still she was a crook…
For days he hardly left his desk except to eat and sleep, neither of which did he do excessively.
Finally the manuscript was completed and sent out in the mail. For the next two days he rested as fully as he had toiled, lying abed to all hours, idling through his waking hours, replacing the nervous energy his work always cost him.
On the third day a note came from the editor of the magazine to which he had sent the story, asking if it would be convenient for him to call at two-thirty the next afternoon.
Four men were with the editor when Carter was ushered into his office. Two of them he knew: Gerald Gulton and Harry Mack, writers like himself. He was introduced to the others: John Deitch and Walton Dohlman. He was familiar with their work, though he had not met them before; they contributed to some of the same magazines that bought his stories.
When the group had been comfortably seated and cigars and cigarettes were burning, the editor smiled into the frankly curious faces turned toward him.
“Now we’ll get down to business,” he said. “You’ll think it a queer business at first, but I’ll try to mystify you no longer than necessary.”
He turned to Carter. “You wouldn’t mind telling us, Mr. Brigham, just how you got hold of the idea for your story ‘The Second-Story Angel,’ would you?”
“Of course not,” Carter said. “It was rather peculiar. I was roused one night by the sound of a burglar in my rooms and got up to investigate. I tackled him and we fought in the dark for a while. Then I turned on the lights and -“
“And it was a woman – a girl!” Gerald Fulton prompted hoarsely.
Carter jumped.
“How did you know?” he demanded.
Then he saw that Fulton, Mack, Deitch, and Dohlman were all sitting stiffly in their chairs and that their dissimilar faces held for the time identical expressions of bewilderment.
“And after a while a detective came in?”
It was Mack’s voice, but husky and muffled.
“His name was Cassidy!”
“And for a price things could be fixed,” Deitch took up the thread.
After that there was a long silence, while the editor pretended to be intrigued by the contours of a hemispherical glass paperweight on his desk, and the four professional writers, their faces beet-red and sheepish, all stared intently at nothing.
The editor opened a drawer and took out a stack of manuscripts.
“Here they are,” he said. “I knew there was something wrong when within ten days I got five stories that were, in spite of the differences in treatment, unmistakably all about the same girl!”
“Chuck mine in the wastebasket,” Mack instructed softly, and the others nodded their endorsement of that disposition. All but Dohlman, who seemed to be struggling with an idea. Finally he addressed the editor.
“It’s a pretty good story, at that, isn’t it, all five versions?”
The editor nodded.
“Yes, I’d have bought one, but five -“
“Why not buy one? We’ll match coins -“
“Sure, that’s fair enough,” said the editor.
It was done. Mack won.
Gerald Fulton’s round blue eyes were wider than ever with a look of astonishment. At last he found words.
“My God! I wonder how many other men are writing that same story right now!”
But in Garter’s mind an entirely different problem was buzzing around.
Lord! I wonder if she kissed this whole bunch, too!
AFRAID OF A GUN
Owen Sack turned from the stove as the door of his cabin opened to admit ‘Rip’ Yust, and with the hand that did not hold the coffeepot Owen Sack motioned hospitably toward the table, where food steamed before a ready chair.
“Hullo, Rip! Set down and go to it while it’s hot. ‘Twon’t take me but a minute to throw some more together for myself.”
That was Owen Sack, a short man of compact wiriness, with round china-blue eyes and round ruddy cheeks, and only the thinness of his straw-coloured hair to tell of his fifty-odd years, a quiet little man whose too-eager friendliness at times suggested timidity.
Rip Yust crossed to the table, but he paid no attention to its burden of food. Instead, he placed two big fists on the tabletop, leaned his weight on them, and scowled at Owen Sack. He was big, this Rip Yust, barrel-bodied, slope-shouldered, thick-limbed, and his usual manner was a phlegmatic sort of sullenness. But now his heavy features were twisted into a scowl.
“They got ‘Lucky’ this morning,” he said after a moment, and his voice wasn’t the voice of one who brings news. It was accusing.
“Who got him?”
But Owen Sack’s eyes swerved from the other’s as he put the question, and he moistened his lips nervously. He knew who had got Rip’s brother.
“Who do you guess?” with heavy derision. “The Prohis! You know it!”
The little man winced.
“Aw, Rip! How would I know it? I ain’t been to town for a week, and nobody never comes past here any more.”
“Yeah, I wonder how you would know it.”
Yust walked around the table, to where Owen Sack – with little globules of moisture glistening on his round face – stood, caught him by the slack of his blue shirt bosom and lifted him clear of the floor. Twice Yust shook the little man – shook him with a lack of vehemence that was more forcible than any violence could have been-and set him down on his feet again.
“You knowed where our cache was at,” he accused, still holding the looseness of the shirt bosom in one muscular hand, “and nobody else that ain’t in with us did. The Prohis showed up there this morning and grabbed Lucky. Who told ‘em where it was? You did, you rat!”
“I didn’t, Rip! I didn’t! I swear to -“