Adventure stories; Brothers -- Fiction; Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories
Take that evening we came home late together, when my cousin Janet with
her new husband was stopping with us. They’d arrived only that day,
and Jerry hadn’t seen Janet since she married and he had never met
Lew Hollings at all or heard anything about him except that they were
married and were to visit us. It was a very hot night and they’d gone
to their rooms early to rest from the train. We’d given them our best
guest rooms,--the pair of bedrooms on the third floor in front with a
dressing room in between. I noticed, as we approached the house, that
the dressing room light was burning and the bedrooms both were dark
with the windows open. Somebody’d forgotten the light; that’s all it
meant to me. Jerry looked up at the house.
“Why, that’s too bad, Steve!” he said. “That” was so plain to him that
it didn’t occur to him that he needed to explain when he finished. “I
thought Janet and Hollings were getting along all right.”
“They are,” I said. “They’re perfectly happy. What gave you the sudden
idea they’re not?”
“Oh, closed doors on a night when it’s eighty-eight and no breeze,
Steve. Neither has a door open, even to the dressing room; they don’t
know the light’s on. They’ve each shut themselves in one room without
opening a door even for a current of air to-night.”
“You’re crazy, Jerry,” I said. “I had dinner with them. There’s nothing
the matter.” That was what my people thought too until Janet and Lew
separated, openly, a couple of weeks later.
Jerry came into my room and, as soon as I saw him, I flung my book to
the foot of the bed; for it was perfectly plain, even to my sort of
wits, that something mighty amazing to him had happened. He was pale
and his blue eyes looked positively big; he has fine eyes, Jerry; you
like them, though they take hold of you and seem to look through you;
the reason you like them, in spite of this, is that while finding out
something of you, they grant you a good deal of him. So they told me
now that Jerry was afraid; and, though we have been companions for
twenty-eight years--that is, since we were babies--and though that
companionship includes service in the Argonne, I had never seen him so
afraid before.
He’d come upstairs with his overcoat on, over his evening clothes, for
he’d been at Ina Sparling’s wedding, and he hadn’t even dropped his hat
downstairs.
“How long you been home, Steve?” he asked, coming beside me.
“Since half-past twelve,” I said.
“Awake all the time?”
“Yes, Jerry.”
“Anybody call for me?”
“No.”
“You’ve not heard the ’phone at all?”
“No. What’s the matter, old fellow?”
“Dot!” said Jerry, staring down at me without now seeing me at all.
“Dorothy Crewe?” I asked, in the way I have of asking perfectly obvious
questions.
“Yes, Steve.”
“Oh; you’ve quarrelled?” I said, imagining I saw a light. “That’s it.”
“I’d trade a good many quarrels for what happened--probably, Steve.”
“To her?” I said again, stupidly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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