Nightmare Town: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

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