“We stop here to see the Museum,” Gin shouted through the bus. “Indian
relics and paintings and the chair Lew Wallace wrote ‘Ben Hur’ in.
Afterwards we walk back to the hotel.”
“Good-bye,” said Blake suddenly, and climbed out. Off across the Plaza
he sprinted; he could be seen intercepting Teddy Madden just as he was
going into the drug store. Gin looked after them and wondered if Teddy
had made any attempt to call her that morning. Perhaps she had better
call him and remind him that they had a date. He was so forgetful.
Mechanically she ushered the dudes into the Palace, then to the first
room on the right.
“Now, here we have a model of the place we saw yesterday. See, here’s
the ruined church....”
But if she called Teddy, Harvey would answer the phone and might think
that she had called to speak to him. Had she a good enough excuse for
calling Teddy? Was she justified in assuming that they were good enough
friends? Oh, to hell with that. There was no reason why she shouldn’t
call him.
“This is the Frijoles room. Frijoles is one of the places we have for
private tours. It is very lovely and very famous: it’s all excavated. We
take it in one-day trips or two: there’s a hotel with cabins for rooms.
It’s most interesting. It has cave-dwellings similar to what we saw
today, but they’re in the walls of the canyon instead of being on a
cliff. There’s a little model of the kiva; see, like the ceremonial cave
we saw today.”
With a guilty feeling, she came back to the business in hand and
listened to herself talking like a Victrola. That was no way to act. One
must put oneself over. Mr. Butts was looking at the pictures on the
walls with a thoughtful eye, a competitive eye. She smiled at him,
glowing with all the force of her personality.
“I’ll tell you what effect that has on me, Mr. Butts,” she said
confidentially. “When I stand there in that canyon I get the queerest
feeling.” It was true, that was the worst of all, she thought. The idea
of telling him! “When I’m there I can’t help feeling that the people who
used to live in those caves are still there, in a way. They’re being
very quiet, and looking at me.” She paused and stared at him with wide
eyes. “It’s silly of me, isn’t it?”
Yes, she had him. He looked down at her and thought about Frijoles and
the dead cave-dwellers, and he looked at her again and thought of the
lost ages when men were men, and of the ladder he had climbed today, and
of the letter he could write home about it. She knew it. She had him.
“You do?” he asked, and there was actually a kindly glint in that fishy
eye. “So that’s how it makes you feel, does it?”
He rubbed his chin. He looked at her and saw her as a person instead of
a courier, a person who had watched him climb that ladder. There would
be no letter to the company. She had him.
“Well, well, well,” he said jovially. “Well well well.”
CHAPTER THREE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account