Xander found the garage to which the Ford had been taken, found a greasy
mechanic who answered to the name of Pete, and was told that Whiting's car
would be in a condition to move under its own power within two days.
"A beautiful snootful you had yesterday," Pete grinned.
Xander grinned back and went on out. He went down to the telegraph office, next door to the Oxnard Hotel, pausing for a moment on the sidewalk to look at a glowing, cream-colored Vauxhall-Velox roadster that stood at the curb-as out of place in this grimy factory town as a harlequin opal in a grocer's window.
In the doorway to the telegraph office Xander paused again, abruptly.
Behind the counter was a girl in tan flannel-the girl he had almost run down twice the previous afternoon-the 'Summers girl' who had refrained from adding to the justice's account against Xander Harris. In front of the counter, leaning over it, talking to her with every appearance of intimacy, was one of the two men he had seen from the staircase window half an hour before-the slender, dandy in gray who had slapped the other's face and threatened him with an automatic.
The girl looked up, recognized Xander, and stood very erect. He took off his hat, and advanced with a grin.
"I'm awfully sorry about yesterday," he said. "I' a crazy fool when I-"
"Do you wish to send a telegram?" she asked frigidly.
"Yes," Xander said; "I also wish to-"
"There are blanks and pencils on the desk near the window," and she turned her back on him.
Xander felt himself colouring, and since he was one of the men who habitually grin when at a loss, he grinned now, and found himself looking into the dark eyes of the man in gray.
"Quite a time you had yesterday," the man in gray said, his British accent sounding condescending to Xander.
"Quite," Xander agreed, and went to the table the girl had indicated. He wrote his telegram:
Henry Richards
Richards Hotel, Whitetufts:
Arrived right side up, but am in hock. Wire me two hundred dollars.
Will be back Saturday.
Harris, X
But he did not immediately get up from the desk. He sat there holding the piece of paper in his fingers, studying the man and the girl, who were again engaged in confidential conversation over the counter. Xander studied the girl most.
She was quite a small girl, no more then five feet and a bit of change in height, if that, and she had that peculiar rounded slenderness which gives a deceptively fragile appearance. Her face was an oval of skin whose fine whiteness had thus far withstood the grimy winds of Oxnard; her nose just missed being upturned, her green-black eyes just missed being too theatrically large, and her blonde-brown hair just missed being too bulky for the small head it crowned; but in no respect did she miss being as beautiful as a figure from a Monticelli canvas.
All these things Xander Harris, twiddling his telegram in sun-brown fingers, considered and as he considered them he came to see the pressing necessity of having his apologies accepted. Explain it as you will-he carefully avoided trying to explain it to himself-the thing was there. One moment there was nothing, in the four continents he knew, of any bothersome importance to Xander Harris; the next moment he was under an inescapable compulsion to gain the favor of this small person in tan flannel with brown ribbons at wrists and throat.
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 her smile seemed forced.
Xander 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.
Harris, X
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," Xander 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," Xander 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- over five 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 need a shave. I'll be waiting on the bench outside." And with that Xander spun on his heel and left the office.
…___…___…
One end of the bench in front of the telegraph office was occupied when Xander, 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, and which his friend Jesse agreed with wholeheartedly-that it all came from a childish attempt to conceal his self-consciousness; that for all his almost thirty years of life and his ten 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 side of the bench remarked.
"Yeah," Xander admitted without turning his head. He supposed he'd be hearing about his crazy arrival as long as he stayed in Oxnard.
"I reckon old man Denvir took you to the cleaner's as usual?"
"Uh-huh!" Xander said, turning now to look at the other.
He saw a very tall, 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 pumes.
"Ever been to our fair young city before?" this melancholy individual asked next. His voice held a monotonous rhythm that was not unpleasant to the ear.
"No, this is my first time."
The thin man nodded ironically. "You'll like it if you stay. It's very interesting."
"What's it all about?" Xander asked, finding himself mildly intrigued by his benchmate.
"Soda-niter-oxide. You scoop it up off the desert, and boil and otherwise cook it, and sell it to artificial blood manufacturers, and fertilizer manufacturers, and any other kind of manufacturers who can use it in something. The factory in which, for which, and from which you do all this lies yonder, beyond the railroad tracks."
He waved a lazy arm down the street, to where a group of square concrete buildings shut out the desert at the end of the thoroughfare.
"Suppose you don't want to play with this Blood Soda?" Xander asked, more to keep the thin man talking than to satisfy any thirst for local knowledge. "What do you do then?"
The thin man shrugged his sharp shoulders. "That depends," he said, "on who you are. If you're Dave Flutie"-he wiggled a finger at the red bank across the street-"you gloat over your mortgages, or whatever it is a banker does; if you're Riley Finn, and too big for a man without being quite big enough for a horse, you pin a badge on your bosom and throw rough- riding strangers into the can until they sober up; if you're Ethan Rain, and your daddy owns the soda works, then you drive trick cars from across the pond"-nodding to the cream Vauxhall-"and spend your days pursing beautiful young telegraph operators. But I take it that you're broke, and have just wired for money, and are waiting for the ore or less doubtful results. Is that it?"
"It is," Xander answered absent-mindedly. So the dandy in gray was named Ethan Rain and was part owner of the town's factory.
The thin man drew in his feet and stood up on them. "In that case it's lunchtime, and my name is Roy Kamp, but everyone calls me Doc, and I'm hungry, and I don't like to eat alone, and I'd be glad to have you face the greasy dangers of a meal at Fury's with me."
Xander got up and held out his hand. "I'll be glad to," he said. "The coffee I had for breakfast could stand company. My name's Alexander Harris, but you can call me Xander."
They shook hands, and started up the street together. Coming toward them were two men in earnest conversation; one of them was the beefy man whose face Ethan Rain had slapped. Steve waited until they passed, and then questioned Doc casually: "And who are those prominent-looking folks?"
"The little round one in the checkered college-boy suit is Conan Elder, real estate, insurance and securities. The walrus-looking fellow at his side was W.W. himself- the town's founder, owner and whatnot-W.W. Rain, the Hon. Ethan's papa."
The scene in the office, with its slapping of a face and flourishing of a pistol, had been a family affair, then; a matter between father and son, with the son in the more forcible role. Xander, walking along with scant attention just now for the words Doc's baritone voice was saying, felt a growing dissatisfaction in the memory of the girl and Ethan Rain talking over the counter with their heads close together.
The Fury's lunchroom was little more than a corridor squeezed in between a poolroom and a hardware store, of barely sufficient width for a counter and a row of revolving stools. Only one customer was there when the two men entered. "Hello, Mr. Abrams," said Doc.
"How are you, Mr. Kamp?" the man at the counter said, and as he turned his head toward them, Xander saw that he was both very young, and very blind. His large brown eyes were filmed over with a gray curtain which gave him the appearance of having dark hollows instead of eyes.
He was a rather small looking man who looked past his thirty's, but there was a suggestion of fewer years in the suppleness of his slender white hands. He had a thick mane of dark hair about a face that was as smooth of lines as pressed silk sheets. It was also a calm face, the face of a man at peace with his world. He was just finishing his meal, and left shortly, moving to the door with the slow accuracy of the blind man in familiar surroundings.
"Young Mr. Abrams," Doc told Xander, "lives in a shack behind where the new firehouse is going to be, all alone. Supposed to have tons of gold coins under his floor-thus local gossip. Someday we're going to find him all momicked up. But he won't listen to reason. Says nobody would hurt him. Says in a town as heavy with assorted thugs as this!"
"A tough town, is it?" Xander asked.
"Couldn't help being! It's only three years old-and desert boo town draws the tough boys."
Doc left Xander after the meal, saying he probably would run across hi later in the evening, and suggesting that there were games of a sort to be found in the next-door poolroom.
"I'll see you there then," Xander said, and went back to the telegraph office. The girl was alone. "Anything for me?" he asked her.
She put a green check and a telegram on the counter and returned to her desk. The telegram read:
Collected bet. Paid Whiting seven hundred for Ford.
Sending balance twenty-three hundred. Shipping clothes.
Watch your step.
Richards.
"Did you send the wire collect, or do I owe-"
"Collect." She did not look up.
Xander put his elbows on the counter and leaned over; his jaw, still exaggerated by its growth of hair, although he had washed the dirt from it, jutted forward with his determination to maintain a proper serious attitude until he had done this thing that had to be done.
"Now listen, Miss Summers," he said deliberately. "I was all kinds of a damned fool yesterday, and I'm sorrier than I can say. But, after all, nothing terrible happened, and-"
"Nothing terrible!" she exploded. "Is it nothing to be humiliated by being chased up and down the street like a rabbit by a drunken man with a dirty face in a worse car?"
"I wasn't chasing you. I came back that second time to apologize. But, anyway"-in the uncomfortable face of her uncompromising hostility his determination to be serious went for nothing, and he relapsed into his accustomed defensive mockery-"no matter how scared you were you ought to accept my apology now and let bygones be bygones."
"Scared? Why-"
"I wish you wouldn't repeat words after me," he complained. "This morning you did it, and now you're at it again. Don't you ever think of anything to say on your own account?"
"She glared at him, opened her mouth, shut it with a little click. Her angry face bent sharply over the papers on the desk, and she began to add a column of figures.
Xander nodded with pretended approval, and took his check across the street to the bank.
The only man in sight in the bank when Xander came in was a little plump fellow with carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper whiskers hiding nearly all of a jovial round face except the eyes-shrewd, friend eyes.
This man came to the window in the grille, and said: "Good afternoon. Can I do something for you?"
Xander laid down the telegraph company's check. "I want to open an account."
The banker picked up the slip of green paper and flicked it with a fat finger. "You are the gentleman who assaulted my wall with an automobile yesterday?" Xander smiled. The banker's eyes twinkled, and a smile ruffled his whiskers. "Are you going to stay in Oxnard?"
"For a while."
"Can you give me references?" the banker asked.
"Maybe Judge Denvir or Marshal Finn will put in a word for me," Xander said. "But if you'll write the First National Bank in Sunnydale, California, they'll tell you that so far as they know I'm all right."
The banker stuck a plump hand through the window in the grill. "I'm very glad to make your acquaintance. My name is David Flutie, and anything I can do to help you get established-call on me."
Outside the bank ten minutes later, Xander met the huge marshal, Riley Finn, who stopped in front of him. "You still here?" Finn asked.
"I'm an Oxnardian now," Xander said. "For a while anyhow. I like your hospitality."
"Don't let old man Denvir see you coming out of a bank," Finn advised him, "or he'll soak you plenty next time."
"There isn't going to be a next time."
"There always is-in Oxnard," the marshal said enigmatically as he got his bulk in motion again.
…___…___…
That night, shaved and bathed, though still wearing the bleached khaki, Xander, with his black stick beside him, played stud poker with Doc and four factory workers. They played in the poolroom next door to Willy's lunchroom. Oxnard apparently was a wide-open town. Twelve tables given to craps, poker, red dog, and twenty-one occupied half of the poolroom, and white-hot liquor was to be had at the cost of two dollars and a raised finger. There was nothing surreptitious about the establishment, obviously its proprietor- a bullet-headed Italian whose customers called him 'Gyp'- was in favor with the legal power of Oxnard
The game in which Xander sat went on smoothly and swiftly, as play does when adepts participate. Though, as most games are, always potentially crooked, it was, in practice, honest. The six men at the table were, without exception, men who knew their way around- men who played quietly and watchfully, winning and losing without excitement or inattention. Not one of the six- except Xander, and perhaps Doc- would have hesitated to favor himself at the expense of honesty had the opportunity come to him; but where knowledge of trickery is evenly distributed honesty not infrequently prevails.
Ethan Rain came into the poolroom at a little after eleven and sat at a table some distance from Xander. Faces he had seen in the street during the day were visible through the smoke. At five minutes to twelve the four factory men at Xander's table left for work- they were in the 'graveyard' shift- and the game broke up with their departure. Xander, who had kept about even throughout play, found that he had won something less then one hundred dollars; Doc had won four hundred-some.
Declining invitations to sit in another game, Xander and Doc left together, going out into the dark and night-cool street, where the air was sweet after the smoke and alcohol of the poolroom. They walked slowly down the dim thoroughfare toward the Oxnard Hotel, neither in a hurry to end their first evening together; for each knew by now that the unpainted bench in front of the telegraph office had given him a comrade. Not a thousand words had passed between the two men, but they had as surely become brothers-in-arms as if they had tracked a continent together.
Strolling thus, a dark doorway suddenly vomited men upon them.
Xander rocked back against a building front from a blow on his head, arms were around him, the burning edge of a knife blade ran down his left arm. He chopped his black stick up into a body, freeing himself from encircling grip. He used the moment's respite this gave him to change his grasp on the stick; so that he held it now horizontal, his right hand grasping its middle, its lower half flat against his forearm, its upper half extending to the left.
He put his left side against the wall, and the black stick became a whirling black arm of the night. The knob darted down at a man's head. The man threw an arm up to fend the blow. Spinning back on its axis, the stick reversed- the ferruled end darted up under warding arm, hit jaw-bone with a click, and no sooner struck than slid forward, jabbing deep into throat. The owner of that jaw and throat turned his broad, thick-featured face to the sky, went backward out of the fight, and was lost to sight beneath the curbing.
Doc, struggling with two men in the middle of the sidewalk, broke loose from the, whipped out a gun; but before he could use it his assailants were on him again.
Lower half of the stick against forearm once more, Xander whirled in time to take the impact of a blackjack-swinging arm upon it. The stick spun sidewise with a thud of knob on temple- spun back with loaded ferrule that missed opposite temple only because the first blow had brought its target down on knees. Xander saw suddenly that Doc had gone down. He spun his stick and battered a passage to the thin man, kicked a head that bent over the prone, thin form, straddled it; and the ebony stick whirled swifter in his hand- spun as quarter-staves once spun in Sherwood Forest. Spun to the clicking tune of wood on bone, on metal weapons; to the duller rhythm of wood on flesh. Spun never in full circles, but always in short arcs- put into space a forty-inch sphere, whose radii were whirling black flails.
Behind his stick that had become a living part of him, Xander Harris knew happiness- that rare happiness which only the expert ever finds- the joy in doing a thing that he can do supremely well. Blows he took- blows that shook him, staggered him- but he scarcely noticed them. His whole consciousness was in his right arm and the stick it spun. A revolver, tossed from a smashed hand, exploded ten feet over his head, a knife tinkled like a bell on the brick sidewalk, a man screamed as a stricken horse screams.
As abruptly as it had started, the fight stopped. Feet thudded away, forms vanished into the more complete darkness of a side street; Xander was standing alone- alone except for the man stretched out between his feet and the other man who lay still in the gutter.
Doc crawled from beneath Xander's legs and scrambled briskly to his feet. "Your work with a bat is what you might call adequate," he drawled.
Xander started at the thin man. This was the man he had accepted on an evening's acquaintance as a comrade! A man who lay on the street and let his companion do the fighting for both. Hot words formed in Xander's throat. "You-"
The thin man's face twisted into a queer grimace, as if he were listening to faint, far-off sounds. He caught his hands to his chest, pressing the sides together. Then he turned half around, went down on one knee, and went over backward with a leg bent over him. "Get-word-to-"
The fourth word was blurred beyond recognition. Xander knelt beside Doc, lifted his head from the bricks, and saw Doc's thin body was ripped open from throat to waistline.
"Get-word-to-" The thin man tried desperately to make the last word audible.
A hand gripped Steve's shoulder.
"What hell's all this?" The roaring voice of Marshal Riley Finn blotted out Doc's words.
"Shut up a minute!" Xander snapped, and put his ear again close to Doc's mouth.
But now the dying man could achieve no articulate sound. He tried with an effort that bulged his eyes; then he shuddered horribly, coughed, the slit in his chest gaped open, and he died.
"What's all this?" the marshal repeated.
"Another reception committee," Xander said bitterly, easing the dead body to the sidewalk and standing up. "There's one of them in the street. The others beat it around the corner. He tried to point with his left hand, then let it drop to his side. Looking at it, he saw that his sleeve was black with blood.
The marshal bent to examine Doc, grunted, "He's dead all right," and moved over to where the man Xander knocked into the gutter lay. "Knocked out," the large man said, straightening up, "but he'll be coming around in awhile. How'd you make out?"
"My arm's slashed, and I've got some sore spots, but I'll live through it."
Riley took hold of the wounded arm and gave it a look. "Not bleeding so bad," he decided. "But you better get it patched up. Doctor MacPhail's is only a little way up the street. Can ya make it, or do you want me to give you a lift?"
"I can make it," Xander said, flexing his hand. "How do I find the place?"
"Two blocks up this street, four to the left. Ya can't miss it. It's the only house in town that has flowers in front of it." Turning his considerable shoulders, Marshal Riley Finn looked down at the body. "I'll get in touch with you when I want you."
"A beautiful snootful you had yesterday," Pete grinned.
Xander grinned back and went on out. He went down to the telegraph office, next door to the Oxnard Hotel, pausing for a moment on the sidewalk to look at a glowing, cream-colored Vauxhall-Velox roadster that stood at the curb-as out of place in this grimy factory town as a harlequin opal in a grocer's window.
In the doorway to the telegraph office Xander paused again, abruptly.
Behind the counter was a girl in tan flannel-the girl he had almost run down twice the previous afternoon-the 'Summers girl' who had refrained from adding to the justice's account against Xander Harris. In front of the counter, leaning over it, talking to her with every appearance of intimacy, was one of the two men he had seen from the staircase window half an hour before-the slender, dandy in gray who had slapped the other's face and threatened him with an automatic.
The girl looked up, recognized Xander, and stood very erect. He took off his hat, and advanced with a grin.
"I'm awfully sorry about yesterday," he said. "I' a crazy fool when I-"
"Do you wish to send a telegram?" she asked frigidly.
"Yes," Xander said; "I also wish to-"
"There are blanks and pencils on the desk near the window," and she turned her back on him.
Xander felt himself colouring, and since he was one of the men who habitually grin when at a loss, he grinned now, and found himself looking into the dark eyes of the man in gray.
"Quite a time you had yesterday," the man in gray said, his British accent sounding condescending to Xander.
"Quite," Xander agreed, and went to the table the girl had indicated. He wrote his telegram:
Henry Richards
Richards Hotel, Whitetufts:
Arrived right side up, but am in hock. Wire me two hundred dollars.
Will be back Saturday.
Harris, X
But he did not immediately get up from the desk. He sat there holding the piece of paper in his fingers, studying the man and the girl, who were again engaged in confidential conversation over the counter. Xander studied the girl most.
She was quite a small girl, no more then five feet and a bit of change in height, if that, and she had that peculiar rounded slenderness which gives a deceptively fragile appearance. Her face was an oval of skin whose fine whiteness had thus far withstood the grimy winds of Oxnard; her nose just missed being upturned, her green-black eyes just missed being too theatrically large, and her blonde-brown hair just missed being too bulky for the small head it crowned; but in no respect did she miss being as beautiful as a figure from a Monticelli canvas.
All these things Xander Harris, twiddling his telegram in sun-brown fingers, considered and as he considered them he came to see the pressing necessity of having his apologies accepted. Explain it as you will-he carefully avoided trying to explain it to himself-the thing was there. One moment there was nothing, in the four continents he knew, of any bothersome importance to Xander Harris; the next moment he was under an inescapable compulsion to gain the favor of this small person in tan flannel with brown ribbons at wrists and throat.
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 her smile seemed forced.
Xander 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.
Harris, X
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," Xander 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," Xander 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- over five 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 need a shave. I'll be waiting on the bench outside." And with that Xander spun on his heel and left the office.
…___…___…
One end of the bench in front of the telegraph office was occupied when Xander, 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, and which his friend Jesse agreed with wholeheartedly-that it all came from a childish attempt to conceal his self-consciousness; that for all his almost thirty years of life and his ten 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 side of the bench remarked.
"Yeah," Xander admitted without turning his head. He supposed he'd be hearing about his crazy arrival as long as he stayed in Oxnard.
"I reckon old man Denvir took you to the cleaner's as usual?"
"Uh-huh!" Xander said, turning now to look at the other.
He saw a very tall, 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 pumes.
"Ever been to our fair young city before?" this melancholy individual asked next. His voice held a monotonous rhythm that was not unpleasant to the ear.
"No, this is my first time."
The thin man nodded ironically. "You'll like it if you stay. It's very interesting."
"What's it all about?" Xander asked, finding himself mildly intrigued by his benchmate.
"Soda-niter-oxide. You scoop it up off the desert, and boil and otherwise cook it, and sell it to artificial blood manufacturers, and fertilizer manufacturers, and any other kind of manufacturers who can use it in something. The factory in which, for which, and from which you do all this lies yonder, beyond the railroad tracks."
He waved a lazy arm down the street, to where a group of square concrete buildings shut out the desert at the end of the thoroughfare.
"Suppose you don't want to play with this Blood Soda?" Xander asked, more to keep the thin man talking than to satisfy any thirst for local knowledge. "What do you do then?"
The thin man shrugged his sharp shoulders. "That depends," he said, "on who you are. If you're Dave Flutie"-he wiggled a finger at the red bank across the street-"you gloat over your mortgages, or whatever it is a banker does; if you're Riley Finn, and too big for a man without being quite big enough for a horse, you pin a badge on your bosom and throw rough- riding strangers into the can until they sober up; if you're Ethan Rain, and your daddy owns the soda works, then you drive trick cars from across the pond"-nodding to the cream Vauxhall-"and spend your days pursing beautiful young telegraph operators. But I take it that you're broke, and have just wired for money, and are waiting for the ore or less doubtful results. Is that it?"
"It is," Xander answered absent-mindedly. So the dandy in gray was named Ethan Rain and was part owner of the town's factory.
The thin man drew in his feet and stood up on them. "In that case it's lunchtime, and my name is Roy Kamp, but everyone calls me Doc, and I'm hungry, and I don't like to eat alone, and I'd be glad to have you face the greasy dangers of a meal at Fury's with me."
Xander got up and held out his hand. "I'll be glad to," he said. "The coffee I had for breakfast could stand company. My name's Alexander Harris, but you can call me Xander."
They shook hands, and started up the street together. Coming toward them were two men in earnest conversation; one of them was the beefy man whose face Ethan Rain had slapped. Steve waited until they passed, and then questioned Doc casually: "And who are those prominent-looking folks?"
"The little round one in the checkered college-boy suit is Conan Elder, real estate, insurance and securities. The walrus-looking fellow at his side was W.W. himself- the town's founder, owner and whatnot-W.W. Rain, the Hon. Ethan's papa."
The scene in the office, with its slapping of a face and flourishing of a pistol, had been a family affair, then; a matter between father and son, with the son in the more forcible role. Xander, walking along with scant attention just now for the words Doc's baritone voice was saying, felt a growing dissatisfaction in the memory of the girl and Ethan Rain talking over the counter with their heads close together.
The Fury's lunchroom was little more than a corridor squeezed in between a poolroom and a hardware store, of barely sufficient width for a counter and a row of revolving stools. Only one customer was there when the two men entered. "Hello, Mr. Abrams," said Doc.
"How are you, Mr. Kamp?" the man at the counter said, and as he turned his head toward them, Xander saw that he was both very young, and very blind. His large brown eyes were filmed over with a gray curtain which gave him the appearance of having dark hollows instead of eyes.
He was a rather small looking man who looked past his thirty's, but there was a suggestion of fewer years in the suppleness of his slender white hands. He had a thick mane of dark hair about a face that was as smooth of lines as pressed silk sheets. It was also a calm face, the face of a man at peace with his world. He was just finishing his meal, and left shortly, moving to the door with the slow accuracy of the blind man in familiar surroundings.
"Young Mr. Abrams," Doc told Xander, "lives in a shack behind where the new firehouse is going to be, all alone. Supposed to have tons of gold coins under his floor-thus local gossip. Someday we're going to find him all momicked up. But he won't listen to reason. Says nobody would hurt him. Says in a town as heavy with assorted thugs as this!"
"A tough town, is it?" Xander asked.
"Couldn't help being! It's only three years old-and desert boo town draws the tough boys."
Doc left Xander after the meal, saying he probably would run across hi later in the evening, and suggesting that there were games of a sort to be found in the next-door poolroom.
"I'll see you there then," Xander said, and went back to the telegraph office. The girl was alone. "Anything for me?" he asked her.
She put a green check and a telegram on the counter and returned to her desk. The telegram read:
Collected bet. Paid Whiting seven hundred for Ford.
Sending balance twenty-three hundred. Shipping clothes.
Watch your step.
Richards.
"Did you send the wire collect, or do I owe-"
"Collect." She did not look up.
Xander put his elbows on the counter and leaned over; his jaw, still exaggerated by its growth of hair, although he had washed the dirt from it, jutted forward with his determination to maintain a proper serious attitude until he had done this thing that had to be done.
"Now listen, Miss Summers," he said deliberately. "I was all kinds of a damned fool yesterday, and I'm sorrier than I can say. But, after all, nothing terrible happened, and-"
"Nothing terrible!" she exploded. "Is it nothing to be humiliated by being chased up and down the street like a rabbit by a drunken man with a dirty face in a worse car?"
"I wasn't chasing you. I came back that second time to apologize. But, anyway"-in the uncomfortable face of her uncompromising hostility his determination to be serious went for nothing, and he relapsed into his accustomed defensive mockery-"no matter how scared you were you ought to accept my apology now and let bygones be bygones."
"Scared? Why-"
"I wish you wouldn't repeat words after me," he complained. "This morning you did it, and now you're at it again. Don't you ever think of anything to say on your own account?"
"She glared at him, opened her mouth, shut it with a little click. Her angry face bent sharply over the papers on the desk, and she began to add a column of figures.
Xander nodded with pretended approval, and took his check across the street to the bank.
The only man in sight in the bank when Xander came in was a little plump fellow with carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper whiskers hiding nearly all of a jovial round face except the eyes-shrewd, friend eyes.
This man came to the window in the grille, and said: "Good afternoon. Can I do something for you?"
Xander laid down the telegraph company's check. "I want to open an account."
The banker picked up the slip of green paper and flicked it with a fat finger. "You are the gentleman who assaulted my wall with an automobile yesterday?" Xander smiled. The banker's eyes twinkled, and a smile ruffled his whiskers. "Are you going to stay in Oxnard?"
"For a while."
"Can you give me references?" the banker asked.
"Maybe Judge Denvir or Marshal Finn will put in a word for me," Xander said. "But if you'll write the First National Bank in Sunnydale, California, they'll tell you that so far as they know I'm all right."
The banker stuck a plump hand through the window in the grill. "I'm very glad to make your acquaintance. My name is David Flutie, and anything I can do to help you get established-call on me."
Outside the bank ten minutes later, Xander met the huge marshal, Riley Finn, who stopped in front of him. "You still here?" Finn asked.
"I'm an Oxnardian now," Xander said. "For a while anyhow. I like your hospitality."
"Don't let old man Denvir see you coming out of a bank," Finn advised him, "or he'll soak you plenty next time."
"There isn't going to be a next time."
"There always is-in Oxnard," the marshal said enigmatically as he got his bulk in motion again.
…___…___…
That night, shaved and bathed, though still wearing the bleached khaki, Xander, with his black stick beside him, played stud poker with Doc and four factory workers. They played in the poolroom next door to Willy's lunchroom. Oxnard apparently was a wide-open town. Twelve tables given to craps, poker, red dog, and twenty-one occupied half of the poolroom, and white-hot liquor was to be had at the cost of two dollars and a raised finger. There was nothing surreptitious about the establishment, obviously its proprietor- a bullet-headed Italian whose customers called him 'Gyp'- was in favor with the legal power of Oxnard
The game in which Xander sat went on smoothly and swiftly, as play does when adepts participate. Though, as most games are, always potentially crooked, it was, in practice, honest. The six men at the table were, without exception, men who knew their way around- men who played quietly and watchfully, winning and losing without excitement or inattention. Not one of the six- except Xander, and perhaps Doc- would have hesitated to favor himself at the expense of honesty had the opportunity come to him; but where knowledge of trickery is evenly distributed honesty not infrequently prevails.
Ethan Rain came into the poolroom at a little after eleven and sat at a table some distance from Xander. Faces he had seen in the street during the day were visible through the smoke. At five minutes to twelve the four factory men at Xander's table left for work- they were in the 'graveyard' shift- and the game broke up with their departure. Xander, who had kept about even throughout play, found that he had won something less then one hundred dollars; Doc had won four hundred-some.
Declining invitations to sit in another game, Xander and Doc left together, going out into the dark and night-cool street, where the air was sweet after the smoke and alcohol of the poolroom. They walked slowly down the dim thoroughfare toward the Oxnard Hotel, neither in a hurry to end their first evening together; for each knew by now that the unpainted bench in front of the telegraph office had given him a comrade. Not a thousand words had passed between the two men, but they had as surely become brothers-in-arms as if they had tracked a continent together.
Strolling thus, a dark doorway suddenly vomited men upon them.
Xander rocked back against a building front from a blow on his head, arms were around him, the burning edge of a knife blade ran down his left arm. He chopped his black stick up into a body, freeing himself from encircling grip. He used the moment's respite this gave him to change his grasp on the stick; so that he held it now horizontal, his right hand grasping its middle, its lower half flat against his forearm, its upper half extending to the left.
He put his left side against the wall, and the black stick became a whirling black arm of the night. The knob darted down at a man's head. The man threw an arm up to fend the blow. Spinning back on its axis, the stick reversed- the ferruled end darted up under warding arm, hit jaw-bone with a click, and no sooner struck than slid forward, jabbing deep into throat. The owner of that jaw and throat turned his broad, thick-featured face to the sky, went backward out of the fight, and was lost to sight beneath the curbing.
Doc, struggling with two men in the middle of the sidewalk, broke loose from the, whipped out a gun; but before he could use it his assailants were on him again.
Lower half of the stick against forearm once more, Xander whirled in time to take the impact of a blackjack-swinging arm upon it. The stick spun sidewise with a thud of knob on temple- spun back with loaded ferrule that missed opposite temple only because the first blow had brought its target down on knees. Xander saw suddenly that Doc had gone down. He spun his stick and battered a passage to the thin man, kicked a head that bent over the prone, thin form, straddled it; and the ebony stick whirled swifter in his hand- spun as quarter-staves once spun in Sherwood Forest. Spun to the clicking tune of wood on bone, on metal weapons; to the duller rhythm of wood on flesh. Spun never in full circles, but always in short arcs- put into space a forty-inch sphere, whose radii were whirling black flails.
Behind his stick that had become a living part of him, Xander Harris knew happiness- that rare happiness which only the expert ever finds- the joy in doing a thing that he can do supremely well. Blows he took- blows that shook him, staggered him- but he scarcely noticed them. His whole consciousness was in his right arm and the stick it spun. A revolver, tossed from a smashed hand, exploded ten feet over his head, a knife tinkled like a bell on the brick sidewalk, a man screamed as a stricken horse screams.
As abruptly as it had started, the fight stopped. Feet thudded away, forms vanished into the more complete darkness of a side street; Xander was standing alone- alone except for the man stretched out between his feet and the other man who lay still in the gutter.
Doc crawled from beneath Xander's legs and scrambled briskly to his feet. "Your work with a bat is what you might call adequate," he drawled.
Xander started at the thin man. This was the man he had accepted on an evening's acquaintance as a comrade! A man who lay on the street and let his companion do the fighting for both. Hot words formed in Xander's throat. "You-"
The thin man's face twisted into a queer grimace, as if he were listening to faint, far-off sounds. He caught his hands to his chest, pressing the sides together. Then he turned half around, went down on one knee, and went over backward with a leg bent over him. "Get-word-to-"
The fourth word was blurred beyond recognition. Xander knelt beside Doc, lifted his head from the bricks, and saw Doc's thin body was ripped open from throat to waistline.
"Get-word-to-" The thin man tried desperately to make the last word audible.
A hand gripped Steve's shoulder.
"What hell's all this?" The roaring voice of Marshal Riley Finn blotted out Doc's words.
"Shut up a minute!" Xander snapped, and put his ear again close to Doc's mouth.
But now the dying man could achieve no articulate sound. He tried with an effort that bulged his eyes; then he shuddered horribly, coughed, the slit in his chest gaped open, and he died.
"What's all this?" the marshal repeated.
"Another reception committee," Xander said bitterly, easing the dead body to the sidewalk and standing up. "There's one of them in the street. The others beat it around the corner. He tried to point with his left hand, then let it drop to his side. Looking at it, he saw that his sleeve was black with blood.
The marshal bent to examine Doc, grunted, "He's dead all right," and moved over to where the man Xander knocked into the gutter lay. "Knocked out," the large man said, straightening up, "but he'll be coming around in awhile. How'd you make out?"
"My arm's slashed, and I've got some sore spots, but I'll live through it."
Riley took hold of the wounded arm and gave it a look. "Not bleeding so bad," he decided. "But you better get it patched up. Doctor MacPhail's is only a little way up the street. Can ya make it, or do you want me to give you a lift?"
"I can make it," Xander said, flexing his hand. "How do I find the place?"
"Two blocks up this street, four to the left. Ya can't miss it. It's the only house in town that has flowers in front of it." Turning his considerable shoulders, Marshal Riley Finn looked down at the body. "I'll get in touch with you when I want you."