"I don't want any."
I stared into his dark eyes for a moment, then I felt rise up inside me a hurt and a loneliness that I had never felt before.
Suddenly, I began to cry.
He put down the tureen.
"Go ahead an' weep, Mr. Cord. Cry yourself out.
But you'll find tears won't drown you any more than whisky."
He was sitting on the porch in the late-afternoon sun when I finally came out.
It was green all around, bushes and trees all the way down the side of the mountain, until it ran into the red and yellow sands of the desert.
He got to his feet when I opened the door.
I walked over to the railing and looked down.
We were a long way from people.
I turned and looked back at him.
"What's for dinner, Robair?" I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. "To tell the truth, Mr. Cord, I was kind of waitin' on how you felt."
"There's a brook near here that has the biggest trout you ever saw."
He smiled.
"A mess o' trout sounds fine, Mr. Cord."
It was almost two years before we came down from the mountain.
Game was plentiful and once a week, Robair would drive down for supplies.
I grew lean and dark from the sun and the bloat of the cities disappeared as the muscles tightened and hardened in my body.
We developed a routine and it was amazing how well the business got along without me.
It merely proved the old axiom: once you reached a certain size, it was pretty difficult to stop growing.
All the companies were doing fine except the picture company.
It was undercapitalized but it didn't matter that much to me any more.
Three times a week, I spoke to McAllister on the telephone. That was generally sufficient to take care of most problems.
Once a month, Mac would come driving up the winding road to the cabin, his brief case filled with papers for me to sign or reports for me to study.
Mac was a remarkably thorough man. There was very little that escaped his observant eye.
In some mysterious way, everything of importance that was going on in any of the companies found its way into his reports. There were many things I knew I should attend to personally but somehow, everything seemed a long way off and very unimportant.
We'd been there almost a year and a half when we had our first outside visitor.
I'd been out hunting and was coming back up the trail, with a brace of quail swinging from my hand, when I saw a strange car parked in front of the cabin. It was a Chevy with California license plates.
I walked around and looked at the registration on the steering column: Rosa Strassmer, M.D., 1104 Coast Highway, Malibu, Cal.
I turned and walked into the cabin. There was a young woman seated on the couch, smoking a cigarette.
She had dark hair, gray eyes and a determined jaw.
When she stood up, I saw she was wearing a faded pair of Levis that somehow accentuated the slim, feminine curve of her hips.
"Mr. Cord?" she asked, holding her hand out to me, a curious, faint accent in her voice. "I’m Rosa Strassmer, Otto Strassmer's daughter." I took her hand, staring at her for a moment. Her grip was firm. I tried to keep the faint tinge of annoyance from showing in my voice.
"How did you know where to find me?"
She took out an envelope and gave it to me.
"Mr. McAllister asked me to drop this off when he heard I was driving through here on my vacation."
I opened the envelope and looked at the paper inside.
It was nothing that couldn't have waited until his next visit.
I dropped it on the table. Robair came into the room just then. He looked at me curiously as he took the brace of quail and my gun and went back into the kitchen.
"I hope I haven't disturbed you, Mr. Cord," she said quickly.
I looked at her.
Whatever it was I felt, it wasn't her fault.
It was Mac's not too subtle reminder that I couldn't stay on the mountain forever.
"No," I answered. "You must forgive my surprise. We don't get many visitors up here."
She smiled suddenly. When she smiled, her face took on a strange bright beauty.
"And I can understand why you don't ask people to come, Mr. Cord," she said.
"More than two people would crowd a paradise like this."
I didn't answer.