I couldn’t go to sleep, even though I heard Judy’s door slam and a long silence ensue. I lay there thinking, about Judy and Clem, and about Kaye Gorman. It didn’t make sense. Nobody who ever loved Judy could love that young woman with her bleached hair and the hard curve of her jaw from behind that melted into such a round baby face in front, and the blue eyes, wide and appealing when she wanted them to be and shrewd and cold as the devil when she wasn’t on guard. And Clem Bonner had loved Judy—I’d have staked my life on that.
I lay there for a long time; and then I reached for the phone without turning on the light, and called Clem Bonner’s apartment in New York. I’d tried to get in touch with him before I came out and hadn’t been able to, and it seemed to me that now it was still more imperative. He’d just be getting up. I waited. I didn’t quite know what I was going to say, except to tell him that Judy needed him, desperately, and that he couldn’t let her down. But I needn’t have bothered; I might as well have been talking to a stone wall.
“I’m sorry—Mr. Bonner has given orders not to be disturbed. I’ll tell him you called.”
And when I insisted, explaining that I was Mrs. Latham, Mrs. Bonner’s aunt, in Reno, and that I demanded he at least go and tell Mr. Bonner I was on the phone, the butler said “Very good, madam,” and then, a minute later, with the most infuriating imperturbability, “Mr. Bonner does not care to be disturbed, madam—good-bye.”
I stared into the dead phone completely dumbfounded, and then slammed it down. “The wretched young prig,” I thought angrily, “—she’s jolly well lucky to get rid of him!”
When I woke up again I rang for my breakfast and got up to the last peaceful day I knew for some time. Even then I should have recognized the calm as ominous . . . the sort that, as they say, precedes the storm. I finished my breakfast, bathed and got dressed. There was no sound from Judy’s room. While it was reasonable to presume that even the young have to sleep some time, I nevertheless had a vague tinge of uneasiness at her sleeping so long. The clock on the square spired tower of the Town Hall said 11:30 when I opened the connecting door and looked in.
She was lying on the sofa, still in her jodhpurs and riding shirt and shoes, her red-gold hair spreading a bright nimbus about her flushed lovely face where tear stains still showed. She was breathing as quietly and evenly as a child. My note was lying on the table.
I closed the door, took the DO NOT DISTURB sign off my dresser, hung it on her door, went down the hall and pressed the elevator bell.
The maid came heavily up the narrow stairs to the right of the elevator.
“Mrs. Bonner is asleep,” I said. “Don’t do my room either, till she wakes up, please.”
She gave me a look that I suppose was long-suffering rather than malevolent, and plodded off down the hall. Halfway along she turned. “You’d better put something Western on,” she said. “They’ll arrest you. I’m from Chicago myself.”
She went on about her business, and I went on about mine.
It was hot and brilliant in Virginia Street. I turned right onto the bridge, and stood looking down into the clear shallow water of the Truckee. It was pleasant to see a stream crystal as God intended it to be, after the turgid muddy waters of the Potomac or the Susquehanna or the Mississippi. And then, just as I’d got there, I suddenly heard the clatter of cowbells and the honking of horns, and realized with a sickening feeling out of all keeping with the carnival air around me, and out of all proportion to the thing itself, that I was about to be stuck into that ridiculous travelling pen, and paraded through the streets, at a moment when I was in anything but a Mi-Carême mood.
I saw them coming, a couple of men in cowboy clothes; there was no use trying to run. And I loathe all horseplay of the sort . . . and to be caught right in the middle of it. . . . For a moment I hated Judy, and her parents, and the whole tawdry business.
Then suddenly, out of a perfectly clear sky, I saw a yellow kerchief with a bucking bronco on one corner stuck into my hand; and a familiar and most disgusted voice said:
“Here, ma’am, take this, and hang on to it. You ought to had sense enough to get one.”
My fingers closed gratefully and weakly on it as I stared up at Sergeant Phineas T. Buck, guard, philosopher and friend extraordinary to my friend Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers, U. S. A., Retired. He was standing there beside me, his granite visage as expressionless yet bleak as the side of a canyon in December, his viscid gray eyes fixed on me with the fine enthusiasm of a dead fish. Sergeant Buck’s six-feet-three and two hundred and twenty pounds of bone and brawn, with his hard-bitten, lantern-jawed and always slightly menacing face on top of it, makes him an extraordinary figure at any time . . . but in Western clothes he was wonderful to behold. He wore cowboy pants—blue levis—and a bright orange satin shirt, and a waistcoat made of the brown-and-white-spotted skin of a calf, or something, and peculiarly fancy boots, and a wide leather belt with “RENO” studded on it in what he later referred to as stimulated rubies, and ten-gallon hat that would have held at least twenty. On it there was a gorgeous wide yellow silk band that said “Winnemucca Rodeo”—why, I never knew.
“Oh, thank you!” I gasped. Then, as I have nothing to say to Sergeant Buck that he’d care to hear, and as he would greatly prefer never to see me at all, much less speak to me, we just stood there while the Kangaroo Court, full of sheepish women in Eastern clothes, clattered by, respecting my Western insignia.
Sergeant Buck turned and spat precisely into the river.
“I expect we’ll be seeing you again, ma’am,” he said, out of one corner of his mouth. There was no mistaking how he felt about that inevitability.
“Well, I’m afraid so,” I said. He started off. I should have liked to ask him where Colonel Primrose was, but I didn’t dare. It so plainly would just have confirmed a deep-seated conviction that his chiefs freedom wasn’t worth a moment’s purchase, and that before he got away from Reno he’d be as firmly and irrevocably bound as the lassoed steer rolling in the dust on the corner of my yellow handkerchief.
Then I noticed that Sergeant Buck had stopped a step or so away from me, and I turned, wondering if it was conceivable that he was about to mention the Colonel of his own free will and volition.
He was not even thinking about me. He was staring straight ahead of him toward the Riverside Bar, the expression on his face quite indescribable.
I followed his gaze, and wasn’t surprised, much. Mrs. de Courcey, in her Pocahontas getup, her henna hair flaming in the sun, hat in hand, a brace of dachshunds on the leash, was holding up traffic crossing from the Hotel Washoe to the Riverside.
“Well, may I be a son of a . . . gun!” Sergeant Buck said slowly, out of the corner of his mouth.
He took off his mammoth hat, and mopped his brow with a red bandanna handkerchief.
Astonishing as Mrs. de Courcey was, I thought, she wasn’t so astonishing as all that. I started to say so, but Sergeant Buck silenced me.
“You got to excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “I been figuring it was you we come up here to see. But I guess I got him all wrong.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded—in my innocent way having been figuring the same thing.
He jerked his head toward Mrs. de Courcey, whose dachshunds had got tangled up with the silver spurs on her Western boots.
“Her,” he said grimly. “She’s an old flame of the Colonel’s. He was drunk a week when she married de Courcey.”
We both watched her disappear into the Riverside Bar.
“So that’s the way it is,” Sergeant Buck said, more grimly