Part 3

“We can make it, hey? How’re we going to make it, with our car layin’ around all over your garage?” The flat-chested one’s tone was arrogant past belief.

Casey was fumbling for strap buckles which he could not reach. He was also groping through his colorful, stage-driver’s vocabulary for words which might be pronounced in the presence of a lady, and finding mighty few that were of any use to him. The combined effort was turning him a fine purple when the lady was seized with another brilliant idea.

“Jack, dear, don’t be harsh. The gentleman meant well--and I’ll tell you, mister, what let’s do! Let’s trade cars till the man has our car repaired. Your car goes just fine, and we can load our stuff in and get out away from this horrible town. Why, the preacher was there and made a speech and said the meanest things about you, because you was having a benefit and at the same identical time you was setting in a saloon gambling. He said it was an outrage on civilization, mister, and an insult to the honest, hardworking people in Lund. Them was his very words.”

“Well, hell!” Casey exploded abruptly. “I’m honest and hardworkin’ as any damn preacher. You can ask anybody!”

“Well, that’s what he said, mister. We certainly didn’t know you was a gambler when we offered to give you a benefit. We certainly never dreamed you’d queer us like that. But you’ll do us the favor to lend us your car, won’t you, mister? You wouldn’t refuse that, and see me and little junior languishin’ in jail when you knew in your heart that--”

“Aw, take the darn car!” muttered Casey distractedly, and hobbled into the garage office where he knew that Bill kept liniment.

Five minutes, perhaps, after that, Casey opened the office door wide enough to fling out an assortment of straps and two crutches.

Sounds from the rear of the garage indicated that Casey’s Ford was “r’arin’ to go,” as Casey frequently expressed it. Voices were jumbled in the tones of suggestions, commands, protest. Casey heard the show lady’s clear treble berating Jack, dear, with thin politeness. Then the car came snorting forward, paused in the wide doorway, and the show lady’s voice called out clearly, untroubled as the voice of a child after it has received that which it cried for.

“Well, good-by, mister! You certainly are a godsend to give us the loan of your car!” There was a buzz and a splutter, and they were gone--gone clean out of Casey’s life into the unknown whence they had come.

Bill opened the door gently and eased into the office, sniffing liniment. The painted hollows under Casey’s eyes gave him a ghastly look in the lamplight when he lifted his face from examining a chafed and angry knee. Bill opened his mouth for speech, caught a certain look in Casey’s eyes, and did not say what he had intended to say. Instead:

“You better sleep here in the office, Casey. I’ve got another bed back of the machine shop. I’ll lock up, and if any one comes and rings the night bell--well, never mind. I’ll plug her so they can’t ring her.” The world needs more men like Bill.

Even after an avalanche human nature cannot resist digging, in the melancholy hope of turning up grewsome remains. I know that you are all itching to put shovel into the debris of Casey’s dreams, and to see just what was left of them!

There was mighty little, let me tell you. I said in the beginning that twenty-five thousand dollars was like a wild cat in Casey’s pocket. You can’t give a man that much money all in a lump and, suddenly, after he has been content with dollars enough to pay for the grub he eats, without seeing him lose his sense of proportion. Twenty-five dollars he understands and can spend more prudently than you, perhaps. Twenty-five thousand he simply cannot gauge. It seems exhaustless. It is as if you plucked from the night all the stars you can see, knowing that the Milky Way is still there and unnumbered other stars invisible even in the aggregate.

Casey played poker, with an appreciative audience and the lid off. Now and then he took a drink stronger than two-and-three-fourths per cent. He kept that up for a night and a day and well into another night. Very well, gather round and look at the remains, and if there’s a moral, you are welcome, I am sure.

Casey awoke just before noon, and went out and held his head under Bill’s garage hydrant with the water running a full stream. He looked up and found Bill standing there with his hands in his pockets, gazing at Casey sorrowfully. Casey grinned.

“How’s she comin’, Bill?”

Bill grunted and spat. “She ain’t. Not if you mean that car them folks wished onto you. The tail light’s pretty fair, though. And in their hurry the lady went off and left a pink silk stockin’ in the back seat. The toe’s wore out of it, though. Casey, if you wait till you overhaul ’em with that thing they wheeled in here under the name of a car--”

“Oh, that’s all right, Bill,” Casey grunted gamely. “I was goin’ to git me a new car, anyway. Mine wasn’t so much. They’re welcome.”

Bill grunted and spat again, but he did not say anything.

“I’ll go see Dwyer, and see how much I got left,” Casey said presently, and his voice, whether you believe it or not, was cheerful.

After a while Casey returned. He was grinning, but the grin was, to a careful observer, a bit sickish. “Say, Bill, talk about poker--I’m off it fer life. Now look what it done to me, Bill! I puts twenty-five thousand dollars into the bank--minus two hundred I took in money--and I takes a check book and I goes over to The Club and gits into a game. I wears the check book down to the stubs. I goes back and asks Dwyer how much I got in the bank, and he looks me over like I was a sick horse he had doubts about bein’ worth doctorin’, and as if he thought he mebby might better take me out an’ shoot me an’ put me outa my misery. ‘Jest one dollar an’ sixty-seven cents, Casey,’ he says to me. ‘If the checks is all in, which I trust they air!’”

Casey got out his plug of chewin’ tobacco and pried off a blunted corner. “An’ hell, Bill! I had that much in the bank when I started,” he finished plaintively.

“Hell!” said Bill in brief, eloquent sympathy.

Casey set his teeth together and extracted comfort from the tobacco. He expectorated ruminatively.

“Well, anyway, I got me some bran’-new socks, an’ they’re paid for, thank God!” He tilted his old Stetson down over his right eye at his favorite, Caseyish angle, stuck his hands in his pocket, and strolled out into the sunshine.