Sunday the Fourteenth
I’ve had a talk with Peter. It simply had to come, for we couldn’t continue to play-act and evade realities. The time arrived for getting down to brass tacks. And even now the brass tacks aren’t as clear-cut as I’d like them to be.
But Peter is not and never was a car-thief. That beetle-headed suspicion has passed slowly but surely away, like a snow-man confronted by a too affectionate sun. It slipped away from me little by little, and began losing its lines, not so much when I found that Peter carried a bill-fold and a well-thumbed copy of Marius The Epicurean and walked about in undergarments that were expensive enough for a prima donna, but more because I found myself face to face with a Peter-Panish sort of honorableness that was not to be dissembled. So I cornered Peter and put him through his paces.
I began by telling him that I didn’t seem to know a great deal about him.
“The closed makimono,” he cryptically retorted, “is the symbol of wisdom.”
I was ashamed to ask just what that meant, so I tried another tack.
“Folks are thrown pretty intimately together, in this frontier life, like worms in a bait-tin. So they naturally need to know what they’re tangled up with.”
Peter, at that, began to look unhappy.
“Would you mind telling me what brought you to this part of the country?” I asked.