They shambled into a trot by unspoken agreement. It suddenly seemed very important to them all that they should get to a warm, dry place, shed their clothes, eat, sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sharon Froman shepherded the woman from the car, this Mrs. Chesbro, into the back room—a queer one, she was, but that could wait. "Take off what you can spare and hang it up," she said briskly, efficiently, and headed back for the front room. There had been something when the woman's husband and Mickey Groff met. Sharon Froman wanted to see.
They were comparing notes on the flood, and that was all right. If you didn't have an ear skilled in detecting the grace notes of conflict it might have sounded like any other strangers in common trouble, but Sharon's ear caught resonances beyond that. Take the woman's husband, for instance. He was chattering away to, of all people, sick-pup Dick McCue; but his eyes kept wandering to Mickey Groff.
Mrs. Goudeket scolded: "Sharon! The blanket for Mr. Starkman, you forgot it?"
"He can take mine," Sharon said—she didn't want to go back to the storeroom just then. She handed the holed, grease-spotted rag to the old man, then remembered and carefully draped it around his shoulders. "They stink," she told him cheerfully. "And I think they've got bugs; but they're better than pneumonia." She grinned at Mickey Groff.
"Thank you, Miss," said Henry Starkman. He had not failed to notice that the girl was playing up to Groff. Gold digger, he diagnosed, archaically and without passion. He was waiting for Chesbro to switch his attention from the kid to Groff. Starkman had sat enough hours in the law-offices of county politicians to smell the beginnings of a deal before it really existed. Chesbro wasn't ready yet; he hadn't even made up his mind to offer something to Groff—quite. But it was in the air. Pretty soon Chesbro would turn to the manufacturer and say something bluff and hearty like, "Well, I see we're going to be chewing each other's ears off in the ring tomorrow," and then, if Chesbro could find a private place to do it, the two of them would be talking quietly for a while....
Starkman hugged the smelly blanket around him. Shivering, he thought querulously: What's the matter with Bess? I want my cocoa.
He shook his head to clear it, and got up to look at the rain outside. He shouldn't be here at all, of course; what had the people made him burgess for, at that fat and sought-after salary of two hundred dollars a year, if not to be on hand when the community was in trouble? And if a flood wasn't trouble—