He half dozed, wondering why the Cavite’s crew had wanted to make her father talk. He would see Carroll and get the truth out of him—get the photographs, too. He dozed again, awoke and dozed, till the pale dawn caught him asleep.
He got up, cramped and very cold. Morrison’s house was dim and dead in the dawn. He started down the road, shivering, sleepy, half starved and irritable.
He found his taxi at Persia, the driver asleep on the cushions. The long drive back to Mobile was too much to contemplate. He told the man to drive to the nearest hotel, and dozed off in the car.
He awoke among streets, trees, houses. He did not know where he was, nor care. A greasy all-night lunch counter met his eye, where he swallowed rolls and hot milk. They told him that there was a hotel in the next block. He never learned its name, but he woke up the night clerk and secured a room. He felt incapable of thought; the Morrison-Rockett imbroglio in its last development was too much for him. He tore off his clothes in a sort of fury of perplexity and fatigue and tumbled between the sheets, where he fell instantly into a deathlike sleep.
CHAPTER VIII
GREEN STONES
He slept right through the morning, dimly heard noon whistles blowing, and slept again. About two o’clock he awoke, rising out of a deep pit of utter unconsciousness, with a vague feeling of awful and momentous things impending.
Then his mind dropped into gear. As in a flash of moving pictures he saw the last crowded hours— the sinking steamer upheaving in the water, the night on the cold Gulf, his housebreaking, the excitement of the stock gamble, and, strangest of all, his midnight encounter with Eva Morrison and the amazing revelations.
He felt rested; the stiffness had been slept out of him. He jumped out of bed, having no idea where he was. Peeping through the window blind he saw an asphalted street in the sun, moving automobiles, palms and giant cacti, and he found himself ravenous for food.
When he went downstairs he learned that he was at the Hotel Royal in Pass Christian. It was too late for lunch, but he went out, found a restaurant, and ate two meals in one. Refreshed and walking in the sunlight, he came back to a sense of reality, after the phantasmagoria of unlikely happenings.
That meeting in the lonely bungalow last night seemed now half incredible. But it was real, and half horrible and half poignantly sweet. Mystery still involved it, and suffering was bound to come after it. Morrison was dead, and his daughter would have to be helped, comforted, looked after. She had said that she had no one in the world but her father. Well, she would have now what he could do. He could help her with money, at any rate; and he blessed the luck now that had led him to play for the fall in Yuma Oil, and even felt softened toward Carroll for having urged it.