"I see, Joe," he answered. "Not a bad idea. May I ask what your story--your novel is to deal with?"

"Deal with? What do you mean?"

"Why, they always deal with some problem, Joe," Garry squared around.

"They always attack the rottenness of the rich, or sob over the rottenness of the poor. They always expound the crime of divorce, or attack the error of matrimony. Now which of----"

"Then I ain't dealing with nothing," stated Joe. "What I'm figurin' on doing is a regular love story. I thought maybe I'd have a nice young chap who--who's building a railroad or something, fall in love with a real nice girl who's the daughter of a fat man who's a crook. I mean the fat man's the crook, not the daughter. And--and----"

"And then what?" asked Garry Devereau.

Fat Joe, unlike the man outside, did not notice that a new note, dangerously hard and wickedly edged with ridicule, had replaced the amus.e.m.e.nt in Garry's voice. He grew a little more enthusiastic.

"Well, that's as far as I've got, right up to now," he admitted with an explosive sigh. "But it looks like a good enough beginning, at that.

All I got to do now is run 'em through three or four hundred pages, with him a-talkin' to her and her a-talkin' at him. All I got to do, accordin' to all the books I've ever read, is see that it don't all come too easy for him, and still turns out all right. I expect I'll run 'em into a clinch with another guy standin' around eatin' his heart out with jealousy. It'll serve him right; he's just that mean sort, you know. Oh, I'll just marry 'em, along toward the end of the last chapter, and that'll kind of close it up."

Stephen O'Mara had been watching Joe's face while the latter talked, and therefore he was no more prepared than was Joe himself for the burst of harsh laughter that came from Garry's lips. It seemed utterly illogical that all actual humor should so swiftly fade from that situation with the first really audible expression of mirth. Steve himself believed it was only simulated, until his eyes swung to Garry's face. But he knew then what thoughts had been with Garret Devereau, all evening, before he had come up unheard to the door.

"Why, you poor simple scholar of nature!" The wan-faced one's lips curled. "You're years behind your day! If you submitted such a screed to a publisher now, he'd think you'd written a history of archaic American types."

He stopped to sneer.

"Listen," he went on. "Listen, and I'll give you a plot, gratis, which, if you handle it right, will make you, overnight! Take your girl--a nice girl, to be sure, sweet and unsophisticated and--and childishly innocent, Joe, and--and well, you'll have to describe her, first, won't you? Let's dress her up, then--dress her up in an evening confection that leaves little to the imagination in front and--and ground for amazement in back. That's a fair starter. If you care to be a.n.a.lytical you can insist that the reason she dresses like that is--oh, just because she's so innocent that she doesn't know any better, eh!

"All right! That establishes her very well. And then we can do just what you planned to do with your dear lady. We'll run her through three or four hundred pages, but with just a trifling change or two.

Every chapter or so I'd leave her, Joe, in a situation that ends with a gasp--no pause even for a caramel! Three or four hundred pages, and then, if you have to marry her off why, let's be honest about it--no?

Marry her off to the sort of a chap whom you'd man-handle to a pulp, Joe, if he came near--say a sister of yours. A nice, white-skinned, red-lipped, sweet, innocent sort of a little girl, Joe--and--and that finish will keep her true to type!"

At the beginning Fat Joe had been all eager attention. His face became heavy with amazement long before Garry's hard voice was still.

"But--but that ain't the kind of a yarn I'm figurin' on," he argued, his high voice faint but dogged. "This ain't going to be any of that tabasco stuff. Nope, I like it better the way I've got it planned.

It--it leaves a better taste in your mouth, too."

Again Garry laughed, to himself it seemed, this time.

"Have your own way," he muttered. "But if you're going to stick to it you'd better label it a romance! Because there's only one kind of a woman, Joe, in reality. Just the kind who's killed what used to be a demand for decent men."

And then, outside in the dark, Stephen O'Mara forgot how sick the other man had been. He was across the threshold in a single stride, and Fat Joe came lightly to his feet as he saw his chief's set face that night.

It wiped, the smile from Garry's lips, too. Squarely in front of the latter Steve halted and spoke with monotonous lack of haste.

"You're going to tell me that you didn't mean that, Garry," he said quietly. "For I'm going to marry one of those women myself."

Garret Devereau's face had been white. It went whiter now. He too came squarely to his feet, his body stiff but very frail in the oversize garments from Steve's wardrobe which he was wearing. He stood and stared emptily into his friend's eyes until something close akin to dreary defiance rose and marked his numbed comprehension.

"What I said," he answered as quietly, "I'd alter for no man. My opinions are my own."

He turned and pa.s.sed outside.

For longer than he realized Steve stood gazing down into the burnt-out fireplace, until another thought, swifter even than the impulse that had lifted him across the threshold and thrust him into speech which, already, he would have given much to recall, whirled him around again.

There was a light in the near end of the storehouse building just above his own cabin, and as he hurried toward it he knew Fat Joe must have fitted it up for the third man's quarters. He knocked at the door, and when there came no response, unbidden he lifted the latch and entered.

Garry was sitting on the edge of his blanketed bunk--sitting with shoulders slumped forward and head bowed low. He did not look up, for he had not heard Steve's entrance. He was pondering over the cylinder of a heavy, blued revolver, spinning beneath his transparent fingers.

But Steve's first inarticulate effort at speech brought his head around. Garry smiled up at him--a smile reminiscent of his rare smile of years before.

"I didn't mean anything, Steve," he said in a hushed voice. "I'm d.a.m.ned sorry I spoke as I did. You see--you see, I just didn't know it would hit you, that's all."

Again Steve swallowed. Dumbly he pointed at the gun.

"What are you doing with that?" he demanded hoa.r.s.ely.

Garry's eyes dropped. He stared at the revolver in his hand in mild perplexity, much as though he, too, were surprised to find it there.

"Why, nothing--nothing. I often take a notion to--to look at it like this."

Then his face went crimson.

"You've heard the news, I see." He tried to hide the bitterness behind the words, but one lip corner twitched and quivered. "They posted you in advance, did they? But you did not believe I was as bad as that, did you? You didn't think, did you, Steve, that I--I'd go out leaving you to blame yourself even a little bit?"

His question was curiously wistful--wistful and as unsteady as the hand which now proffered that blunt-barreled, huge-bore gun.

"Here, you take it, if--if you'll sleep the sounder. And don't you worry over me. I'll see you in the morning, Steve."

CHAPTER XIV

A GIRL LIKE HER

Save for a short and casual "see you in the morning, Garry," Stephen O'Mara turned without a word that night and left the improvised sleeping-quarters in the storehouse shack. It was a man's leave-taking, short to abruptness, so badly stereotyped that it denied utterly any consciousness of threatened, reckless tragedy and cordially intimate only because in all man-to-man speech there is less and less of actual sincerity in a multiplicity of words. But he might have talked till daylight and still have failed to register the binding acceptance of Garry's promise, which his silence, unaided, achieved.

Soundlessly, unemotionally, Steve closed the door on that figure on the bunk edge which, suddenly slack of limb and shoulder, had averted its face. But then, there in the darkness, with the gun swinging heavily between loose fingers, he hesitated in his very first step back from the threshold. And twice, head bowed in indecision, he halted in his slow progress from that door to the lighted one of his own cabin which framed Fat Joe's immobile form--halted each time as though he would return--and each time went slowly forward again. Fat Joe's eyes barely flitted over Steve's face that night; they clung in a fixed, pale blue stare of fear to the weapon in his hand. And long after Steve had drawn up a chair next the one which Garry had vacated and fallen to filling his pipe, he stood, shifting from foot to foot in awkward, uncomfortable silence. He crossed after a time and slipped into the empty seat. His tongue was as haltingly guilty as his face was pink with shame when he began to speak.

"Steve," he stammered, "Say, Steve, I--I didn't know I was going to start anything like that when I begun talking my ideas of art and literature and such like. I didn't see where it was leading us to--not for a minute. Why, Steve, every blessed hour of the days and nights since you've been away, I've been dodgin' every topic of conversation I thought might hit him hard. I'm just several a.s.sorted kinds of fool--and you followed him that quick and quiet!" The apology was tinged with pride. "I just didn't think---- But ain't he got a poor opinion of women folks, though? Was it--a close decision?"

Steve shook his head; he smiled and the returning surety in his face did much to clear Joe's features.

"No," Steve answered, "not very. Somehow I know already that I needn't have followed at all, so far as that contingency was concerned. And it was my fault, Joe, not yours. I should have told you exactly how such things stood in Garry's mind--would have, if I had had the time. His opinion of women isn't very high. And it's odd, too, isn't it, that both the very highest and very lowest of such opinions are always held by men who base them upon what they have been taught by one woman alone. Tell me, Joe, what's happened? How have you and Garry hit it off, since I went down river? . . . Trouble?"

The fat man's eager denial was still self-consciously defensive.

"Not a bit!" he stated. "Not one little wrangle, even. Of course I was expectin' it. I've watched 'em come around too many times not to know how they can cuss a man cold one minute, and then make him plumb ashamed of mankind in general, with beggin' and pleadin'. I just beat him to it the morning he woke up; I told him what he could have, and what he couldn't, and he took it calmly enough. He just set there, pretty blue and shaky, and not quite clear in his head, and smiled that slow grin of his that's hardly any smile at all.

"I don't mean that he didn't swear! O my--O my! It's nice, ain't it, to have the gift of ease and eloquence in speech? He made me feel sort of amateurish and inadequate--me! But he didn't beg.

Not--one--peep--out--of--him! He told me what he thought of me just as polite and cool as could be and let it go at that. He said he guessed I was boss, for a while at least, and asked for chopped fine!" Fat Joe hesitated. His color grew higher again. "After what's just happened,"

he added, "I'm almost ashamed to mention it, but--but ain't this friend of yours one of them chaps they call 'thoroughbreds' in novels?"

Steve flashed a glance at that earnest face. For a moment he had forgotten the first glimpse he had caught of Joe that evening, bent double over the block of yellow paper--a glimpse which still seemed funny and yet not very funny either.

"He comes of a very old family," he replied. "Old as they are reckoned in this country." And his answer held a question.