Storch gave him a puzzled glance. Fred could see that he was uncertain, baffled… But in the end he turned away from the unlocked door with a shrug.
Fred Starratt smiled with inner satisfaction. He was glad that he had come back to give Storch that "even break." It was something of an achievement to have compelled Storch's faith in so slight a thing as a literal honesty.
But Storch didn't take the couch. He threw his coat aside and crept into his wretched pile of quilts on the floor, as he said:
"You may want to snatch forty winks or so before the night is over."
There was a warm note in his voice, a bit of truant fatherliness that added an element of grotesqueness to the situation. He might have used the same words and tone to a son about to take the highroad to fortune on the morrow. Or to a lad determined to start upon a sunrise fishing trip, and impatient of the first flush of dawn. After all, it took great simplicity to approach the calamitous moments of life through the channels of the commonplace.
Presently Storch was snoring with the zest which he always brought to sleep. The night air had chilled the room past the point of comfort and the lamp seemed to make little headway with its thin volume of ascending warmth. Fred wrapped himself in a blanket and sat half shivering in the gloom. At first, detached and unrelated thoughts ran through his brain, but gradually his musing assumed a coherence. To-morrow, at this time, he might be either a hunted murderer or a victim himself of Storch's desperation. In any case, he would be furnishing the text for many a newspaper sermon. How eagerly they would trace his downfall, sniffing out the salacious bits for the furtive enjoyment of the chemically pure! For there would be salacious bits. Had he not spent the preceding night in the company of a fallen woman? One by one the facts would be brought out, added to and subtracted from, until the whole affair was a triumph of the transient story-teller art, unrelieved by the remotest flash of understanding. They would interview his former employers first. Mr. Ford would say:
"A steady, conscientious, faithful employee until he became bitten with parlor radicalism."
And Brauer, rather frightened, yet garrulous, would add, for want of anything better:
"An honest partner until he began hitting the booze."
There would be his wife, too. "I did all I could. Stood by him to the last … even when I discovered that there was another woman."