LITMIR.BIZ

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what the man at Virginia City said—and he said it wouldn’t be the first time it had been used for that.”

      She poked the end of it into her own flat little stomach and smiled, more like the Judy I knew, all of a sudden, than she had been before. “In fact, I’d rather thought of using it myself.”

      Whitey grinned, looking at me. “I’ll bet,” he said.

      Judy took my arm again. “Come along, darling,” she said. We went out. I was aware of a curious silence that we left behind us, and then, out of it, I heard Kaye Gorman . . . and with no possible hope that Judy wasn’t hearing her too. “Lord, no wonder Clem made her come out. I thought it was only his sanity he was afraid of, but God, it’s his life too!”

      I felt Judy’s body stiffen, her hand tighten in a little spasm on my arm. Then she relaxed suddenly, with what seemed to me a rather woeful attempt at sang-froid.

      “I’d especially like to use it on that woman,” she said.

      She gripped my arm again. “Oh, I hate her, Grace—I hate her!”

      “I know, angel,” I said. “But—”

      She laughed. “I’m sorry! Don’t pay any attention to me, darling.”

      We got out of the elevator. Judy unlocked the door of her apartment. She stood for a moment looking at the table, with a little oddly-bewildered look, as if something she had been dreading had escaped her. Then her eyes roved around the room.

      “If you’re looking for that paper,” I said, throwing my hat on the sofa, “I put it in the waste basket.”

      I looked at her. Her face was crumpled, suddenly, and I don’t know what happened to the space between us, for the next instant Judy Bonner was in my arms, crying as if her heart would break. She was also sitting on my hat, which I’d paid thirty-five dollars for in a mad moment in New York.

      “I thought you’d seen it in Chicago, and hadn’t got off the plane, when they didn’t find you,” she sobbed miserably. “And here I’d been waiting for you to come, and she came instead! I . . . I just thought I couldn’t bear it!”

      “Oh, lamb, don’t be stupid,” I said. I was practically weeping myself.

      She sat up and dabbed at her eyes with a wadded handkerchief she fished out of her jodhpurs pocket, and sniffled.

      Then she gave me a sort of miserable smile.

      “If you do that in an alley in Reno, somebody tries to sell you dope,” she said. Then she smiled again. “I always say you can pick up useful information in the most unlikely places if you have an open mind.”

      “So it seems,” I said. I was glad to be able to laugh at something. “I see by the papers you’ve gone in for gambling—I hope you don’t do dope too.”

      “No,” she said. Her gray eyes lighted for an instant, and became grave again. “I keep strictly to minor vices. They say a lot of divorcées do go in for dope, but I doubt it, unless they did before they came. They clean the place up once in a while—but they do everywhere, don’t they?”

      “They seem to,” I said.

      “They say Whitey takes dope.”

      She put her miner’s candle pick, which had been sticking uncomfortably into my ribs, on the table.

      “But that’s one of the charming things about Reno—you can hear anything you like about anybody.”

      She shrugged. “Maybe Whitey does take dope, but he’s been awfully decent to me. Of course you’ve got to watch him. He’ll take you for a ride every chance he gets, so don’t ever let him suggest a straight game of blackjack. He’s just naturally crooked, and as long as you remember that, he’s really a grand guy. He’d just cheat his grandmother out of her last cent, but then he’d turn around and give somebody else his last cent.”

      “I see,” I said—not seeing, really. “And . . . your friend Mr. Cromwell?”

      Judy’s clear brow clouded. “He’s all right,” she said quietly.

      She went abruptly to the cocktail bar and poured out a stiff jolt of scotch. In the mirror I could see her face, unhappy and bitter again. She shot the glass half-full of soda, raised it to her lips, and put it down again without touching it.

      “I don’t know why I do that,” she said abruptly. “I don’t like it.”

      I tried to poke my hat back into shape.

      “It’s universally regarded as one of the least successful ways of solving emotional problems, Mrs. Bonner,” I said. I got up. “I’m sorry, Judy. I didn’t realize he was such a . . . a sore point. But I’d just thought, in my old-fashioned way, that if he’s to be a member of the family shortly, I’d rather like to know—if not who his great-grandfather’s father was—at least where you met him. But think nothing of it, darling.”

      I took my bag off the table.

      “Are you dining with me, or have you got a date? I can manage beautifully. I’ve got a thousand letters to write.”

      “You’re coming to the River House with us,” she said.

      And just as I got to my door she came quickly after me.

      “I’m sorry, Grace!” she whispered contritely, rubbing her nose against my shoulder. If you bring children up in stables, I suppose, you’ve got to expect them to act rather like horses. “I’m such a pig . . . and I don’t mean to be . . . not really!”

      “Pigs are quite sensible people,” I said. “You aren’t acting like a pig, darling. You’re just being silly. But let’s skip it. I don’t want to know anything you don’t want to tell me.”

      She went back to the table and stood, opening and closing the silver cigarette box.

      “I’ve known Dex quite a while,” she said, in a dull little voice. “Before I came to Reno.”

      She went on, not very steadily, and without raising her head.

      “I . . . I said I’d marry him. Before I . . . left home.”

      “That’s swell, then,” I said.

      I was far from meaning it, but I was definitely glad, nevertheless, that she hadn’t just picked him up along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams . . . forgetting, for a little moment, that it’s a road that stretches on to infinity, only touching Reno as it passes.

      I opened my door. “Does one dress?”

      She looked up and laughed, her face suddenly alive and bright again.

      “Only if you think you can get your man better if you haven’t got much on. Kaye Gorman’ll be dressed. I’m keeping these on.”

      4

      I’d never realized until that night what a restricted and completely mousey life I’d led. And I never realized until I got home again how utterly blissful a quiet private meal can be. On the other hand, I never ate better food, or drank better wine, or heard more amusing—and shocking—songs, or saw more diverting and totally cockeyed people, than I did at Reno’s River House. It’s one of the so-called divorce dens, I imagine. It’s certainly a den, with its painted Moorish pillars, and lights so dim and pink that the most ageing customer looks rosy-cheeked and dewy-eyed.

      Through all the extraordinary and tragic things that were lying in wait for me, and that broke with the suddenness of a Washoe Zephyr—sardonically so called by the early miners because it sprang up at the drop of a hat and was likely to level every building, church or saloon, that they managed to erect in that barren and bitter wilderness—the River House of Reno remained a haven. The five days following my arrival seem now the most harrowing I’ve ever spent. I would have left Reno, my hair turned white in a single night, if it hadn’t

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