It was noon, and Terry found that the dining room was packed to the last
chair. The sweating waiter improvised a table for him in the corner of
the hall and kept him waiting twenty minutes before he was served with
ham and eggs. He had barely worked his fork into the ham when a familiar
voice hailed him.
"Got room for another at that table?"
He looked up into the grinning face of Denver. For some reason it was a
shock to Terry. Of course, the second meeting was entirely coincidental,
but a still small voice kept whispering to him that there was fate in it.
He was so surprised that he could only nod. Denver at once appropriated a
chair and seated himself in his usual noiseless way.
When he rearranged the silver which the waiter placed before him, there
was not the faintest click of the metal. And Terry noted, too, a certain
nice justness in every one of Denver's motions. He was never fiddling
about with his hands; when they stirred, it was to do something, and when
the thing was done, the hands became motionless again.
His eyes did not rove; they remained fixed for appreciable periods
wherever they fell, as though Denver were finding something worth
remembering in the wall, or in a spot on the table. When his glance
touched on a face, it hung there in the same manner. After a moment one
would forget all the rest of his face, brutal, muscular, shapeless, and
see only the keen eyes.
Terry found it difficult to face the man. There was need to be excited
about something, to talk with passion, in order to hold one's own in the
presence of Denver, even when the chunky man was silent. He was not
silent now; he seemed in a highly cheerful, amiable mood.
"Here's luck," he said. "I didn't know this God-forsaken country could
raise as much luck as this!"
"Luck?" echoed Terry.
"Why not? D'you think I been trailing you?"
He chuckled in his noiseless way. It gave Terry a feeling of expectation.
He kept waiting for the sound to come into that laughter, but it never
did. Suddenly he was frank, because it seemed utterly futile to attempt
to mask one's real thoughts from this fellow.
"I don't know," he said, "that it would surprise me if you _had_ been
tailing me. I imagine you're apt to do queer things, Denver."
Denver hissed, very softly and with such a cutting whistle to his breath
that Terry's lips remained open over his last word.
"Forget that name!" Denver said in a half-articulate tone of voice.
He froze in his place, staring straight before him; but Terry gathered an
impression of the most intense watchfulness--as though, while he stared
straight before him, he had sent other and mysterious senses exploring
for him. He seemed suddenly satisfied that all was well, and as he
relaxed, Terry became aware of a faint gleam of perspiration on the brow
of his companion.
"Why the devil did you tell me the name if you didn't want me to use it?"
he asked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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