Knight's Gambit Read Online Free PDF

with him years ago. “Ever smoke them?” he said. “No,” I said. “They must be city cigarettes.” Then he told me how he had sold the other package just that day. He said he was behind the counter, with the newspaper spread on it, sort of half reading the paper and half keeping the store while the clerk was gone to dinner. And he said he never heard or saw the man at all until he looked up and the man was just across the counter, so close that it made him jump. A smallish man in city clothes, West said, wanting a kind of cigarette that West had never heard of. “I haven’t got that kind,” West said. “I don’t carry them.” “Why don’t you carry them?” the man said. “I have no sale for them,” West said. And he told about the man in his city clothes, with a face like a shaved wax doll, and eyes with a still way of looking and a voice with a still way of talking. Then West said he saw the man’s eyes and he looked at his nostrils, and then he knew what was wrong. Because the man was full of dope right then. “I don’t have any calls for them,” West said. “What am I trying to do now?” the man said. “Trying to sell you flypaper?” Then the man bought the other package of cigarettes and went out. And West said that he was mad and he was sweating too, like he wanted to vomit, he said. He said to me, “If I had some devilment I was scared to do myself, you know what I’d do? I’d give that fellow about ten dollars and I’d tell him where the devilment was and tell him not to never speak to me again. When he went out, I felt just exactly like that. Like I was going to be sick.” ’
    Stevens looked about at us; he paused for a moment. We watched him: ‘He came here from somewhere in a car, a big roadster, that city man did. That city man that ran out of his own kind of tobacco.’ He paused again, and then he turned his head slowly and he looked at Virginius Holland. It seemed like a full minute that we watched them looking steadily at one another. ‘And a nigger told me that that big car was parked in Virginius Holland’s barn the night before Judge Dukinfield was killed.’ And for another time we watched the two of them looking steadily at each other, with no change of expression on either face. Stevens spoke in a tone quiet, speculative, almost musing. ‘Someone tried to keep him from coming out here in that car, that big car that anyone who saw it once would remember and recognize. Maybe that someone wanted to forbid him to come in it, threaten him. Only the man that Doctor West sold those cigarettes to wouldn’t have stood for very much threatening.’
    ‘Meaning me, by “someone,” ’ Virginius said. He did not move or turn away his steady stare from Stevens’ face. But Anselm moved. He turned his head and he looked at his brother, once. It was quite quiet, yet when the cousin spoke we could not hear or understand him at once; he had spoken but one time since we entered the room and Stevens locked the door. His voice was faint; again and without moving he appeared to writhe faintly beneath his clothes. He spoke with that abashed faintness, that excruciating desire for effacement with which we were all familiar.
    ‘That fellow you’re speaking of, he come to see me,’ Dodge said. ‘Stopped to see me. He stopped at the house about dark that night and said he was hunting to buy up little-built horses to use for this—this game—’
    ‘Polo?’ Stevens said. The cousin had not looked at anyone while he spoke; it was as though he were speaking to his slowly moving hands upon his lap.
    ‘Yes, sir. Virginius was there. We talked about horses. Then the next morning he took his car and went on. I never had anything that suited him. I don’t know where he come from nor where he went.’
    ‘Or who else he came to see,’ Stevens said. ‘Or what else he came to do. You can’t say that.’
    Dodge didn’t answer. It was not necessary, and again he had fled behind the shape of