The girl teetered out on her spiky heels, with a sway of hips.
De Launay turned back to the lawyer. “I’ve a little personal business you might attend to,” he said. Wilding set himself to listen, resignedly, imagining that this bum would yield him nothing of profit.
In ten minutes he was staring at De Launay with amazement that was almost stupefaction, fingering documents as though he must awake from sleep and find he had been dreaming. De Launay talked on, his voice slightly thick, his eyes heavy, but his mind clear and capable.
Wilding went with him to a bank and, after their business there was finished, shook hands in parting with a mixture of astonishment, disapproval and awe.
De Launay, having finished the more pressing parts of his business, made straight for Johnny the Greek’s. 110 The two burros still stood there, eyes closed and heads hanging. He walked around them before going in. A worn, dirty leather scabbard, bursting at the seams, slanted up past the withers of one brute, and out of its mouth projected the butt of a rifle. The plate was bright with wear, and the walnut of the stock was battered and dull with age.
De Launay scratched the chin of the burro, was rewarded by the lazy flopping of an ear and then went in to his delayed orgy.
He had received a shock, as he realized he would, and for the moment all thought of Solange and his responsibility to her had vanished. He had come back home after twenty years, seeking solace in the scenes he had known as a boy, seeking, with half-sentimental memory, a little girl with bright hair and sweet face. He had come to find a roaring, artificial city on the site of the range, the friends of his youth gone, the men he had known dying out, his very trade a vanishing art. Instead of a fairy maiden, sweet and demure, a grown-up child as he had vaguely pictured her, he had found a brazen, painted, slangy, gum-chewing flapper, a modern of moderns such as would have broken old Ike Brandon’s heart—as it doubtless had. The last of the old-timers were a bootlegging bartender and a half-crazy and wholly vicious prospector.
Writhing under the sting of futility and disappointment, even the rotten poison served by Johnny the 111 Greek appealed to him. His old neurosis, almost forgotten in the half-tolerant, half-amused interest in Mademoiselle d’Albret’s adventure which had occupied his activities during the past weeks, revived with redoubled force. Sick, shaken, and disgusted, he strode through the pool room and, with deliberation masking his avid desire for forgetfulness, climbed the stairs to the hidden oasis presided over by his old enemy, Snake Murphy. 112