第64章

MISS GEORGIE ALSO MAKES A CALL

Saunders, limp and apathetic and colorless, shuffled over to the station with a wheelbarrow which had a decrepit wheel, that left an undulating imprint of its drunken progress in the dust as it went. He loaded the boxes of freight with the abused air of one who feels that Fate has used him hardly, and then sidled up to the station door with the furtive air which Miss Georgie always inwardly resented.

She took the shipping bill from him with her fingertips, reckoned the charges, and received the money without a word, pushing a few pieces of silver toward him upon the table. As he bent to pick them up clawing unpleasantly with vile finger-nails--she glanced at him contemptuously, looked again more attentively, pursed her lips with one corner between her teeth, and when he had clawed the last dime off the smooth surface of the table, she spoke to him as if he were not the reptile she considered him, but a live human.

"Horribly hot, isn't it? I wish _I_ could sleep till noon. It would make the days shorter, anyway.""I opened up the store, and then I went back to bed," Saunders replied limply. "Just got up when the freight pulled in. Made so blamed much noise it woke me. I seem to need a good deal of sleep." He coughed behind his hand, and lingered inside the door. It was so unusual for Miss Georgie to make conversation with him that Saunders was almost pitifully eager to be agreeable.

"If it didn't sound cruel, this weather," said Miss Georgie lightly, still looking at him--or, more particularly, at the crumpled, soiled collar of his coarse blue shirt--"I'd advise you to get out of Hartley once a day, if it was no more than to take a walk. Though to be sure," she smiled, "the prospect is not inviting, to say the least. Put it would be a change; I'd run up and down the track, if I didn't have to stick here in this office all day.""I can't stand walking," Saunders whined. "It makes me cough."To illustrate, he gave another little hack behind his hand. "Iwent up to the stable yesterday with a book, and laid down in the hay. And I went to sleep, and Pete thought I was lost, I guess."He grinned, which was not pleasant, for he chewed tobacco and had ugly, discolored teeth into the bargain.

"I like to lay in the hay," he added lifelessly. "I guess I'll take my bed up there; that lean-to is awful hot.""Well, you're lucky that you can do exactly as you please, and sleep whenever you please." Miss Georgie turned to her telegraph instrument, and began talking in little staccato sparks of electricity to the agent at Shoshone, merely as a hint to Saunders to take himself away.

"Ain't been anything for me?" he asked, still lingering.

Miss Georgie shook her head. He waited a minute longer, and then sidled out, and when he was heard crunching over the cinders with his barrow-load of boxes, she switched off the current abruptly, and went over to the window to watch him.

"Item," she began aloud, when he was quite gone, her eyes staring vacantly down the scintillating rails to where they seemed to meet in one glittering point far away in the desert." Item--"But whatever the item was, she jotted it down silently in that mental memorandum book which was one of her whims. "Once I put a thing in that little blue book of mine," she used to tell her father, "it's there for keeps. And there's the advantage that Inever leave it lying around to be lost, or for other people to pick up and read to my everlasting undoing. It's better than cipher--for I don't talk in my sleep."The four- thirty- five train came in its own time, and brought the two missing placer miners. But it did not bring Baumberger, nor Peaceful Hart, nor any word of either. Miss Georgie spent a good deal of time staring out of the window toward the store that day, and when she was not doing that she was moving restlessly about the little office, picking things up without knowing why she did so, and laying them down again when she discovered them in her hands and had no use for them. The ice cream came, and the cake, and the magazines; and she left the whole pile just inside the door without undoing a wrapping.

At five o'clock she rose abruptly from the rocker, in which she had just deposited herself with irritated emphasis, and wired her chief for leave of absence until seven.

"It's important, Mr. Gray. Business which can't wait," she clicked urgently. "I'll be back before Eight is due. Please."Miss Georgie did not often send that last word of her own volition. All up and down the line she was said to be "Independent as a hog on ice"--a simile not pretty, perhaps, nor even exact, but frequently applied, nevertheless, to self-reliant souls like the Hartley operator.

Be that as it may, she received gracious permission to lock the office door from the outside, and she was not long in doing so, and heaved a great sigh of relief when it was done. She went straight to the store, and straight back to where Pete Hamilton was leaning over a barrel redolent of pickled pork. He came up with dripping hands and a treasure-trove of flabby meat, and while he was dangling it over the barrel until the superfluous brine dripped away, she asked him for a horse.

"I dunno where Saunders is again," he said, letting his consent be taken for granted. "But I'll go myself and saddle up, if you'll mind the store. Soon as I finish waitin' on this customer," he added, casting a glance toward a man who sat upon the counter and dangled his legs while he apathetically munched stale pretzels and waited for his purchases.

"Oh, I can saddle, all right, Pete. I've got two hours off, and I want to ride down to see how the Harts are getting along.

Exciting times down there, from all accounts.""Maybe I can round up Saunders. He must be somewheres around,"Pete suggested languidly, wrapping the pork in a piece of brown paper and reaching for the string which dangled from the ball hung over his head.