Harold Bindloss
Northwest!
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4057664562982
Table of Contents
XV TROOPER SIMPSON'S PRISONERS
I
JIMMY SIGNS A NOTE
The small room at the Canadian hotel was hot and smelt of cigar-smoke and liquor. Stannard put down his cards, shrugged resignedly, and opened the window. Deering smiled and pulled a pile of paper money across the table. He was strongly built and belonged to a mountaineering club, but he was fat and his American dinner jacket looked uncomfortably tight.
Deering's habit was to smile, and Jimmy Leyland had liked his knowing twinkle. Somehow it hinted that you could not cheat Deering, but if you were his friend you could trust him, and he would see you out. Now, however, Jimmy thought he grinned. Jimmy had reckoned on winning the pool, but Deering had picked up the money he imagined was his.
Jackson wiped a spot of liquor from his white shirt and gave the boy a sympathetic glance. Jackson was thin, dark-skinned and grave, and although he did not talk much about himself, Jimmy understood he was rather an important gentleman in Carolina. Stannard had indicated something like this. Stannard and Jimmy were frankly English, but Jimmy was young and the other's hair was touched by white.
Yet Stannard was athletic, and at Parisian clubs and Swiss hotels men talked about his fencing and his exploits on the rocks. He was not a big man, but now his thin jacket was open, the moulding of his chest and the curve to his black silk belt were Greek. All the same, one rather got a sense of cultivation than strength; Stannard looked thoroughbred, and Jimmy was proud he was his friend.
Jimmy was not cultivated. He was a careless, frank and muscular English lad, but he was not altogether raw, because he knew London and Paris and had for some time enjoyed Stannard's society. His manufacturing relations in Lancashire thought him an extravagant fool, and perhaps had grounds for doing so, for since Jimmy had broken their firm control his prudence was not marked.
"I must brace up. Let's stop for a few minutes," he said and went to the window.
The room was on the second floor, and the window opening on top of the veranda, commanded the valley. Across the terrace in front of the hotel, dark pines rolled down to the river, and the water sparkled in the moon. On the other side a belt of mist floated about the mountain slope and dark rocks went up and melted in the snow. The broken white line ran far North and was lost in the distance. One smelt the sweet resinous scents the soft Chinook wind blew across the wilderness.
Jimmy's glance rested on the river and the vague blue-white field of ice from which the green flood sprang. Now the electric elevators had stopped, the angry current's measured throb rolled across the pines. But for this, all was very quiet, and the other windows opening on the veranda were blank. Jimmy remembered the hotel manager himself had some time since firmly put out the billiard-room lights, when Jimmy was about ten dollars up at pool. He had afterwards won a much larger sum at cards, but his luck had begun to turn.
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