“Of course I figured on goin’,” he said, when his breath returned, “but I been a little undecided––jest a trifle! But I ought to be there; he might be a mite anxious if they wasn’t somebody from home. 274 And I’ll give it to him then––I’ll give it to him when he’s won!”
He went a bit unsteadily back to his waiting buggy.
“She had that all ready to give me,” he said to himself as he climbed up to the high seat. Tentatively his fingers touched the little lump that the spangly bow of red made inside his coat. “She’s had it all ready for me––mebby for days! But how’d she know I was a-goin’?” he asked himself. “How’d she know, when I didn’t know myself?”
He gave it up as a feminine whimsicality too deep for mere male wisdom. Once on the way back he thought of the route that would go mailless the next day.
“’Twon’t hurt ’em none to wait a day or so,” he stated, and his voice was just a little tinged with importance. “Maybe it’ll do ’em good. And there ain’t no way out of it, anyhow––for I surely got to be there!”
CHAPTER XVIII
Morehouse did not hear the door in the opaque glass partition that walled his desk off from the outer editorial offices open and close, for all that it was very quiet. Ever since the hour which followed the going to press of the afternoon edition of the paper the huge room, with its littered floor and flat-topped tables, had been deserted, so still that the buzzing of a blue-bottle fly against the window pane at Morehouse’s side seemed irritatingly loud by contrast.
The plump newspaperman in brown was too deeply preoccupied to hear anything so timidly unobtrusive as was that interruption, and only after the intruder had plucked nervously at the elbow that supported his chin did he realize that he was not alone. His head came up then, slowly, until he was gazing back into the eyes of the little, attenuated old man who, head tilted birdlike to one side, was standing beside him in uncomfortable, apologetic silence.