LITMIR.BIZ

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efforts to keep Colonel Primrose out of my designing hands. But watching him lumber down the street in his movie costume I realized that it wasn’t, and that a real and formidable danger had risen, now that Mrs. de Courcey was about to be a free woman again. I even felt a sudden glow of something like sympathy for Sergeant Buck—the situation, from his point of view, was certainly complicated. And then, for a moment, and in spite of the fact that the idea of my marrying Colonel Primrose has never been in anybody’s mind but Buck’s, I felt a twinge of—I suppose—just old-fashioned jealousy. We all, no doubt, have our little vanity.

      I might have brooded longer on the wound mine had got if I hadn’t just then seen the hat check girl, Vicki, in her white riding breeches and black boots, coming across the bridge.

      “Hello,” she said. “Have you seen Mr. Cromwell anywhere?”

      “Not this morning,” I said.

      “Where’s Mrs. Bonner?”

      “She’s still asleep.”

      “Have you seen Kaye Gorman?”

      “No,” I said. “Isn’t it rather early for any of these people?—It’s just noon.”

      She pointed a red-tipped finger at me and nodded soberly.

      “I think you’ve got something there,” she said. She turned to say “Hi!” to a couple of men just getting in a car, and got in with them.

      I crossed the street. A policeman, marking the front tires of cars along the curb with a piece of yellow chalk on a stick, had stopped at Judy’s open cream-colored roadster and was giving her a third ticket.

      “I’ll get the keys and move this,” I said. “It’s owner’s still asleep.”

      The cop grinned.

      “The keys are in it,” he said. “You can put it on the side street there. It’ll be okay.”

      At three o’clock Judy was still asleep. The sun was streaming in through the long open windows. I drew the curtains and tip-toed out, hoping she’d sleep on. But she didn’t. She woke up as I got to my door and sat up, looking around her, bewildered and slightly dazed.

      “Gosh, I must have been asleep,” she said. She rubbed her eyes like a flushed sleepy child. I nodded. She sat there, staring ahead of her, her eyes gradually changing as reality focussed in her mind.

      Suddenly she raised her eyes to mine. A sharp spasm of pity tore my heart. It didn’t seem possible that any twenty-one-year-old could hold such anguish.

      “Call Clem for me—will you, Grace?” she said, unsteadily.

      “You’d better do it yourself, darling,” I said. “I did call him, and was told he didn’t care to be disturbed.”

      She stared at me with parted lips and stricken eyes.

      “Did you tell him who you were?”

      I nodded. “But I’ll call him again . . .”

      “No, no!” she said quickly. “Never mind. It’s all right.”

      She got up abruptly and stood by the window looking out. After a little she came back to the sofa, sat down and reached for a cigarette, and lighted it, without, I knew, the faintest awareness of what she was doing.

      I picked up the phone. “Send Mrs. Bonner some coffee and bacon and eggs and toast immediately,” I said.

      She got up and went over to the window again. I could see her slim shoulders quivering, her brown fists clenched. Then suddenly she came back to me.

      “Oh, I can’t stand it, Grace!” she whispered. “I can’t stand it! Oh, what have I done . . . what have I done!”

      She let her head sink on my shoulder, her arms tightly around me, and mine around her. At first I thought she was crying, but she wasn’t.

      Then she galvanized into life at the jangle of the phone beside us. I looked at her sharply, completely dumbfounded at the change that came over her.

      “Answer it, Grace,” she whispered. “Please—answer it!”

      I picked it up, said “Hello,” and listened. I turned round to her.

      “It’s Joe, at the ranch,” I said. “He wants to know if you’re coming out.”

      She relaxed abruptly, and pushed her bright hair back from her forehead, pale even under its deep sun tan. God knows what she expected to hear. I had no idea . . . not then.

      “Oh, yes!” she cried, almost hysterically. “Tell him of course I’m coming! Tell him I’ll be right out!”

      And she dashed for the bath.

      Which is how I happened to be in my room half an hour later when Colonel Primrose—apparently free for a moment from Mrs. de Courcey—telephoned and asked me to go for a ride with him . . . and how, what with one thing and another, we were taking our horses out of the paddock, a little after six, and trotting around the race track, a mile or so out of town.

      “Buck said he saw you,” Colonel Primrose said.

      We were going around the half-mile track, my horse, a two-year-old named Dragonfly, shying at every post.

      “He doesn’t approve of Reno. He thinks it’s a cesspool of iniquity.”

      He cocked his head down, giving me an amused glance. He got a bullet in his neck at the Argonne, so that whenever he wants to turn his head he has to duck a little, which makes him look rather like a parrot. The impression is sustained by the way his dark eyes can contract and dilate, on occasion, with appalling shrewdness, behind the kindly twinkle that’s ordinarily there. It’s always there when he’s talking about his Sergeant Buck, who was with him in the Army and now lives with him in the old yellow brick house in Georgetown lived in by generations of Primroses, and manages him as if he were the heavyweight champion instead of a retired gentleman of independent means who’s turned a hobby into an amazingly lucrative profession.

      “Well,” I said, “he’s finally discovered it’s not me that’s the triple threat, but Mrs. de Courcey.”

      I grabbed the martingale as Dragonfly shied at the grain in the center field, agitated by a sudden gust of wind sweeping across the flat.

      “Mary de Courcey is a very amusing woman,” Colonel Primrose said seriously. “She used to be a great beauty. I think she’s still remarkably handsome.”

      “Oh, very,” I said. “—If it weren’t for her hair,” I added . . . but not out loud.

      Colonel Primrose glanced at me. “You’ve got a nice seat,” he said.

      We rode on. The sun dropped behind the bowl of dun-colored hills around us, a veil of purple and indigo and rose settled over them. The low grandstand with its banners and the neat rows of whitewashed stalls beyond the board fence might have been miles from Virginia Street and the Hotel Washoe.

      “As a matter of fact,” he said after a while, “I’m glad Buck’s worried about Mary de Courcey.”

      “Why?”

      He looked around at me with a chuckle.

      “You’ve heard about red herrings.”

      “Are you sure it’s she that’s the red herring?” I asked, very stupidly.

      We were going around the outside track then.

      “I wish I thought it would make the least difference to you, my dear,” he said quietly.

      Dragonfly shied at a branch of cotton wood that the wind blew from one of the big trees lining the board fence along the back lane, and shied again at a couple of bluebottles buzzing around his ear. I was so occupied keeping him in order, trying not to let Colonel Primrose see that his sudden seriousness had definitely startled me, and trying to assure myself at the same time

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