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At this point the man in gray leaned farther over the counter, to whisper something to the girl. She flushed, and her eyes flinched. The pencil in her hand fell to the counter, and she picked it up with small fingers that were suddenly incongruously awkward. She made a smiling reply, and went on with her writing, but the smile seemed forced.

Steve tore up his telegram and composed another:

I made it, slept it off in the cooler, and I am going to settle here a while. There are things about the place I like. Wire my money and send my clothes to hotel here. Buy Whiting’s Ford from him as cheap as you can for me.

He carried the blank to the counter and laid it down.

The girl ran her pencil over it, counting the words.

“Forty-seven,” she said, in a tone that involuntarily rebuked the absence of proper telegraphic brevity.

“Long, but it’s all right,” Steve assured her. “I’m sending it collect. ”

She regarded him icily.

“I can’t accept a collect message unless I know that the sender can pay for it if the addressee refuses it. It’s against the rules. ”

‘You’d better make an exception this time,” Steve told her solemnly, “because if you don’t you’ll have to lend me the money to pay for it. ”

“I’ll have-?”

“You will,” he insisted. “You got me into this jam, and it’s up to you to help me get out. The Lord knows you’ve cost me enough as it is — nearly two hundred dollars! The whole thing was your fault. ”

“My fault?”

“It was! Now I’m giving you a chance to square yourself. Hurry it off, please, because I’m hungry and I need a shave. I’ll be waiting on the bench outside. ” And he spun on his heel and left the office.

One end of the bench in front of the telegraph office was occupied when Steve, paying no attention to the man who sat there, made himself comfortable on the other. He put his black stick between his legs and rolled a cigarette with thoughtful slowness, his mind upon the just completed scene in the office.

Why, he wondered, whenever there was some special reason for gravity, did he always find himself becoming flippant? Why, whenever he found himself face to face with a situation that was important, that meant something to him, did he slip uncontrollably into banter — play the clown? He lit his cigarette and decided scornfully — as he had decided a dozen times before — that it all came from a childish attempt to conceal his self-consciousness; that for all his thirty-three years of life and his eighteen years of rubbing shoulders with the world — its rough corners as well as its polished — he was still a green boy underneath — a big kid.

“A neat package you had yesterday,” the man who sat on the other end of the bench remarked.

“Yeah,” Steve admitted without turning his head. He supposed he’d be hearing about his crazy arrival as long as he stayed in Izzard.

“I reckon old man Denvir took you to the cleaner’s as usual?”

“Uh-huh!” Steve said, turning now for a look at the other.

He saw a very tall and very lean man in rusty brown, slouched down on the small of his back, angular legs thrust out across the sidewalk. A man past forty, whose gaunt, melancholy face was marked with lines so deep that they were folds in the skin rather than wrinkles. His eyes were the mournful chestnut eyes of a basset hound, and his nose was as long and sharp as a paper-knife. He puffed on a black cigar, getting from it a surprising amount of smoke, which he exhaled upward, his thin nose splitting the smoke into two gray plumes.