“You are a queer one,” she said, seating herself on the opposite edge of the table, so that she was sufficiently adjacent, and at the requisite angle at which to carry on her flirtation satisfactorily. “Say,” she went on, with a down drooping of her eyelids, “why ain’t you in there playin’ poker? Guess you’re missin’ heaps o’ fun. I wish I was a ‘boy.’ I wouldn’t miss such fun by sitting around in here.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Toby grinned, while his brains struggled to find a happy reply. “Well, you see,” he hazarded at last, “poker an’ whisky ain’t to be compared to talkin’ to a dandy fine gal with yaller hair an’ elegant blue eyes.”
He passed one of his great hands across his forehead as though his attempt had made him perspire. But he had his reward. Birdie contrived a blush of pleasure, and edged a little nearer to him.
“Gee, you can talk pretty,” she declared, her lips parted in an admiring smile. “It makes me kind o’ wonder how you fellers learn it.” Then she added demurely, “But I ain’t pretty, nor nothing like you fellers try to make out. I’m jest an ord’nary sort of girl.”
“No you ain’t,” broke in Toby, feeling that his initial success had put him on the top of the situation, and that he had nothing now to fear. Besides, he really felt that Birdie was an uncommonly nice girl, and, in a vague way, wondered he had never noticed it before.
“That you ain’t,” he went on emphatically. Then he added as though to clinch his statement, “not by a sight.”
This brought him to a sudden and uncomfortable stop. He knew he ought to go on piling up compliment on compliment to make good his point. But he had emptied his brain cells by his threefold denial, and now found himself groping in something which was little better than a vacuum. And in his trouble he found himself wishing he was gifted with Sunny’s wit. Wild Bill’s force would have carried him through, or even Sandy Joyce’s overweening confidence would have kept his head above water. As it was he was stuck. Hopelessly, irretrievably at the end of his resources.
He perspired in reality now, and let his knees drop out of his arms. This movement was his salvation. With the relaxing of his physical effort the restraining grip upon his thinking powers gave way. Inspiration leaped, and he found himself talking again almost before he was aware of it.
“You’re a real pretty gal, Birdie,” he heard himself saying. “Now, maybe you got some kids?” he added, with an automatic grin of ingratiation.
How the inquiry slipped out he never knew. How it had been formulated in his brain remained a riddle that he was never able to solve. But there it was, plain and decided. There was no shirking it. It was out in all its naked crudeness.