He thought of fleeing to his mother, but he was ashamed; of fleeing to Lulu, but he did not dare.
He heard that Eddie Fislinger had been yanked to Schoenheim to marry Lulu and Floyd Naylor . . . a lonely grim affair by lamplight.
“They might have ast me, anyway,” grumbled Elmer, as he packed.
He went back to Monarch and the friendliness of Ad Locust. He confessed that he had been a minister, and was forgiven. By Friday that week Elmer had become a traveling salesman for the Pequot Farm Implement Company.
CHAPTER XI
I
elmer gantry was twenty-eight, and for two years he had been a traveling salesman for the Pequot Company.
Harrows and rakes and corn-planters; red plows and gilt-striped green wagons; catalogues and order-lists; offices glassed off from dim warehouses; shirt-sleeved dealers on high stools at high desks; the bar at the corner; stifling small hotels and lunch-rooms; waiting for trains half the night in foul boxes of junction stations, where the brown slatted benches were an agony to his back; trains, trains, trains; trains and time-tables and joyous return to his headquarters in Denver; a drunk, a theater, and service in a big church.
He wore a checked suit, a brown derby, striped socks, the huge ring of gold serpents and an opal which he had bought long ago, flower-decked ties, and what he called “fancy vests”—garments of yellow with red spots, of green with white stripes, of silk or daring chamois.
He had had a series of little loves, but none of them important enough to continue.