LITMIR.BIZ

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Dex held her at arms’ length and looked up and down her slim smart figure.

      “You look like a million! But you’d better get the city clothes off, or they’ll have you in the jug!”

      I scrambled around for my luggage.

      “Hotel Washoe, miss?”

      An odd-looking colored man, also in a red satin shirt (rayon, this time) and a cowboy hat, broke through the milling crowd and grabbed my bag. Somebody took down the steps, and the big red and silver plane roared away, and the little crowd around went suddenly flat. Like a New Year’s Eve party when you wonder, all of a sudden, what you’re shouting about, and wish you were home in bed where it’s quiet. At least that’s the way I feel, on New Year’s parties, and after having been in Reno a week it’s certainly the way I feel about divorce parties. Except that the let-down is worse. It didn’t occur to me then, as it always did later, that the girl flying away over the dun-colored mountains had quit laughing too, and the faint nausea in the pit of her stomach wasn’t entirely due to the sudden rising from the earth.

      But I didn’t think about that then. All I thought about was that the deflated little crowd of people in circus clothes was moving away. Somebody said, “Oh God, if I don’t get a drink I’m going to die,” and that seemed to put a little life into them again.

      “I’m taking Kaye in,” the man called Dex said. “The rest of you can get in with Whitey.”

      He tossed the blonde girl’s bag into a dark green coupé standing there. Considering what that car came to mean to me in the next few days, it’s surprising I didn’t notice then that it was custom-made, with yellow leather seats and a tortoise-shell wheel, and carried New York license plates.

      “Hey—where’s the old lady?” the man they called Whitey shouted from the big open car that all the rest of them had piled into. He was a bandy-legged little man in tan jodhpurs and a salt-sack polo shirt, and his hair, eyes and eyelashes were so blond that he was practically albino.

      Dex shrugged. “Dunno. Must have missed the plane.”

      Then one girl in Whitey’s car got out. I saw her say something to the rest of them, and both cars vanished in a cloud of dust. She came swiftly across the sand to me—a slight, willowy girl with dark chestnut curls cropped close to her head, nice dark eyes, and no makeup except the scarlet lips and the warm brown of the desert sun. She had on blue jeans and a white shirt open at the neck. She smiled a friendly rather shy smile. “Are you by any chance Judy Bonner’s aunt Mrs. Latham?”

      “Yes, I am,” I said.

      She laughed a little.

      “The rest of them said you were too young—you were just another customer out for a divorce,” she said. “I’m Polly Wagner. I’m a friend of Judy’s. She asked us to meet you.”

      We shook hands. All the things I’d been hearing about Reno sort of evaporated. Here was another girl like Judy—not like the blonde girl on the plane.

      I smiled with some relief. “Where is Judy?” I asked.

      Her dark eyes clouded just a little.

      “I’ll go in with you, part way,” she said. She held the door of the Hotel Washoe’s lumbering old limousine open and we got in, while my colored cowboy labored to get it started, the perspiration making large spots on his rayon satin shirt.

      She gave me a quick little smile.

      “Judy’s perfectly all right,” she said. “I don’t mean she’s not. But . . . you know, Reno’s an awfully funny place. It does odd things to people, if—well, if they’re unhappy. And Judy is, even if she’d rather die than admit it.”

      I didn’t say anything. Polly Wagner, who didn’t look a day older than sixteen, flushed.

      “Please don’t think I’m barging in on Judy’s private life. But I . . . well, she’s such a perfectly swell person I hate to see her sort of . . . oh, you know how when you’re hurt and bewildered, and all that, you try to pretend you’re having a grand time, and you dance all night just because you can’t bear to go to bed and be by yourself to think, and you’re too proud to just go in a corner and die.”

      “Is that what Judy’s doing?” I asked quietly.

      “Well, not exactly. But—she’s staying in town. Most girls like her go out to one of the good ranches. I’m at Sun Mountain Ranch. But she was out one night and went back. It was so quiet she couldn’t stand it.”

      “You seem to be standing it,” I said. I looked at her eager young face that certainly had nothing tragic or unhappy in it.

      She smiled again. “That’s different. You see, I’m like about ninety per cent of the people who come out here. They know they’re going to marry somebody they’re awfully in love with before they come. They’ve made a mess of one marriage and everything’s ahead of them. The ranch is marvellous then, because you’ve got time to think, and you’ve got something awfully swell to think about. The other ten per cent just have a mess behind and nothing ahead. The desert’s empty and . . . desolate, then. Me, for instance—I’m going to marry a man I adore, and I’ve had a perfectly rotten five years. So I . . . I love the desert, and the mountains, and the . . . the peace. I don’t get any kick out of gambling and night clubs.”

      “And Judy does?”

      “That’s the point,” she said quickly. “She doesn’t. She hates it all. But she’s got to do something to keep her mind off . . . off things. Oh, you know how it is, don’t you? It’s why Paris was so gay during the war.”

      “Yes, I know,” I said. I wondered vaguely where she’d heard that. She must have been a babe in arms when Paris was so gay.

      She turned her open friendly young face earnestly to mine.

      “What I mean is, don’t . . . don’t be surprised at people like Dex Cromwell, and the rest of them—and don’t let her do anything she’ll be sorry for when she gets away from here . . .”

      “Who is Dex Cromwell?” I asked.

      She looked a little embarrassed.

      “He was the man back there with the red shirt and the green car, who took the other woman off the plane.”

      “Oh,” I said. “And does everybody always dress as if he belonged to a circus?”

      She laughed.

      “That’s just for the rodeo. But if it isn’t the rodeo it’s something else. It helps people forget their troubles.”

      She looked at the watch on her brown wrist.

      “I’ll get out here and wait for the station wagon to Sun Mountain.”

      My cowboy chauffeur drew up beside the gray walls of the Nevada Stock Farm on the main road. Polly Wagner started to get out. Then she turned back to me.

      “What’s Clem Bonner like?”

      I looked a little surprised, I suppose. “Hasn’t Judy told you?”

      She shook her head.

      “She never mentions him, and when everybody else starts telling what perfectly swell people their husbands are—so you wonder why on earth they’re getting a divorce until you find out that’s part of the Reno pattern—Judy always leaves. I think she’s still frightfully in love with him. I just wondered what sort of a person he is.”

      “I should have thought he was perfectly grand,” I said. “I like him a lot. This divorce is all bewildering to me.”

      “There’s your car, miss.”

      The chauffeur pointed to a station wagon coming along the road. Polly dashed out and stood in the road, waving one hand to them and the other to me. A nice-looking girl driving drew up to take her in. There were five others in the back, all in the clothes people wear at dude ranches,

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