Presently, Blanche, the girl who had stopped the music, touched him on the arm.
“I know there is nothing much I can do for you,” she said. “I know how it feels; but I thought perhaps you’d like to bring her inside, and you can have my room till you—till the funeral.”
And Harrison thanked her. But next day he moved the body to an empty cabin that stood on the river bank in the pine grove back of the Comique. He could not bury her, he could not give her up, he said. True, she could not speak to him, nor move, but even to have her body with him was something, a kind of comfort. The bitter cold of the Northland, the icy winds that roared in untrammeled fury down the cañon—these had killed her; now they would preserve the beauty they had stilled; keep her forever young, as he had known and loved her. Why should he bury her? And when they spoke to him of burial, he bade them leave him alone.
Only in the afternoons, when there was no dancing in the Comique, Blanche used still to go daily to the cabin in the pines, and brought him a padlock for the door, and a lantern, and other things.
It all might have drifted on in such wise indefinitely, had it not been that in a month Harrison had no money to buy his meals with, and that Blanche asked him point blank about it.
“Why don’t you come over and ask Coughlin for something to do?” she said, when Harrison admitted that he had eaten no dinner that day. Coughlin was the man who ran the Comique.
“What could I do?” inquired Harrison. “I’m only a bookkeeper.”
But that night he asked Coughlin about it. Now twice a day Coughlin put all the gold and bank-notes that were in the cash drawer into his pocket, leaving the silver for change; and he kept his accounts, which were few, in his head; and he didn’t need a bookkeeper. But he was sorry for Harrison; and, besides, Blanche had spoken to him of it, and he wanted to oblige her. For Blanche was popular among the men, and was asked to drink oftener than any girl in the house, and was valuable on that account in a country where one gets a dollar for two drinks. So he told Harrison he could go to work.
“In the morning?” said Harrison.
“Any time,” said Coughlin.