“They won’t find them bundles,” Jack Mills told him; and, while Bud could only stare with widening eyes, he cheerfully explained: “You see, I was cold for a spell. So I had me a little bonfire in that cave.”
There was something hideous and craven in the relief that leaped into the eyes of Bud Loupel. Mills reached through the bars, caught the other’s shoulder, shook him upright. “Take a brace, Bud,” he said gently. “Go on home.”
Bud Loupel could not speak. He turned and went stumbling toward the door; he forgot so little a thing as shaking his pardner’s hand in farewell. Jack watched him go; and as the other reached the door he called:
“Take care of Jeanie, Bud.”
Loupel turned to look back, muttered a low assent, went on his way. Mills heard him speak to Russ as he departed. Then the deputy came to look in and make sure that the prisoner was still secure. He resumed his seat on a chair tipped against the wall, just outside the door.
Mills went back to the bench against the rear of his cell and rolled and smoked a cigarette. Then he lay down, one knee crossed above the other, and the man on guard heard him whistling.
Heard him whistling softly, between his teeth, a gay and gallant and triumphant little tune.
THE MAN WHO LOOKED LIKE EDISON
I
ERNIE BUDDER was a leading member of a profession not always given its just due—that is to say, he was an expert washer of automobiles. You have seen his like in your own service-station, garbed in rubber boots and rubber apron, a long-handled soapy brush in one hand, and the ragged end of a line of hose without a nozzle in the other. But unless you have attempted on your own account the task he so expeditiously performs, you have never properly appreciated this man. By the time you have run water over your car, only to find that it dries in muddy spots upon the varnished surface; by the time you have wet it again and wiped it hurriedly, and found the result suggestive of the protective coloration of a zebra; by the time you have for a third time applied the hose, and scrubbed with the sponge, and wiped with the chamois, and picked off with your fingernails the lint and dust that still persist in sticking, you will have begun to value at their true worth such men as Ernie Budder.