“Well, Judge,” he said.
“Boys will be boys, wont they?”
He didn’t offer to shake hands.
Instead he bulked above Horace with that air somehow assured and alert at the same time, glancing over his shoulder at the street.
“Like I say, it never done no man no harm to git out now and then and—”
“What is it now?” Horace said.
“What do you want with me?”
“Now, now, Judge.
I aint going to tell this at home.
Git that idea clean out of your mind.
If us boys started telling what we know, caint none of us git off a train at Jefferson again, hey?”
“You know as well as I do what I’m doing here.
What do you want with me?”
“Sure; sure,” Snopes said.
“I know how a feller feels, married and all and not being sho where his wife is at.”
Between jerky glances over his shoulder he winked at Horace.
“Make your mind easy.
It’s the same with me as if the grave knowed it.
Only I hate to see a good—” Horace had gone on toward the door.
“Judge,” Snopes said in a penetrant undertone.
Horace turned.
“Dont stay.”
“Dont stay?”
“See her and then leave.
It’s a sucker place.
Place for farm-boys.
Higher’n Monte Carlo.
I’ll wait out hyer and I’ll show you a place where—” Horace went on and entered the lattice.
Two hours later, as he sat talking to Miss Reba in her room while beyond the door feet and now and then voices came and went in the hall and on the stairs, Minnie entered with a torn scrap of paper and brought it to Horace.
“What’s that?” Miss Reba said.
“That big pie-face-ted man left it fer him,” Minnie said.
“He say fer you to come on down there.”
“Did you let him in?” Miss Reba said.
“Nome.
He never tried to git in.”
“I guess not,” Miss Reba said. She grunted.
“Do you know him?” she said to Horace.
“Yes.
I cant seem to help myself,” Horace said.
He opened the paper.
Torn from a handbill, it bore an address in pencil in a neat, flowing hand.
“He turned up here about two weeks ago,” Miss Reba said.
“Come in looking for two boys and sat around the dining-room blowing his head off and feeling the girls’ behinds, but if he ever spent a cent I dont know it.
Did he ever give you an order, Minnie?”
“Nome,” Minnie said.
“And couple of nights later he was here again.
Didn’t spend nuttin, didn’t do nuttin but talk, and I says to him
‘Look here, mister, folks what uses this waiting-room has got to get on the train now and then.’
So next time he brought a half-pint of whiskey with him.
I dont mind that, from a good customer.