United States or Ethiopia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The whole population, apparently, had piously gone up the mountain in order to let us have our little drama out alone. I do not know how it struck Ching Po; but I felt very small on that swept and garnished scene. I was winded; and with the hope of reaching Stires well dashed, my legs began to crumple. I sank down for a few seconds on the low wall of some one's compound.
I spared him the effort of polishing off his lie. The man wanted to be alone with his trouble, and that was a state of mind I understood only too well. The circumstantial evidence I had before me as I walked back to my own house led inevitably to one verdict. I could almost reconstruct the ignoble pidgin-splutter in which Ching Po had told Stires, and was even now telling Follet.
He was going now to collect his check; but perhaps the old, easy system of balancing matters at the end of the month might not be said to obtain any longer. Stires might ask him to present a voucher of deposit. If so, he could not now get this check for sixty thousand dollars, for he did not have the certificates to deposit.
And because Follet and I were both in what Naapu would have called its best circles, I never talked about Follet, though I liked him no better than Stires did. I say it began with Stires; but it began really with Schneider, introduced by Stires into our leisurely conversation.
It was not Stires, after all, who found her, though he must have hunted the better part of that night. It was three days before she was washed ashore. She was discovered by a crew of fishermen whom she had often beaten down in the way of business. They brought her in from the remote cove, with loud lamentations and much pride.
Even good Madame Maür, who squinted, squinted more painfully at Follet than at any one else. But his idleness was beginning to tell on him; occasionally he had moody fits, and there were times when he broke out and ran amuck among beach-combers and tipsy natives along the water-front. More than once, Ching Po sought him out and fetched him home. My first intimation of trouble came from Stires.
Stires looked like a cowboy and was, in truth, a melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small a very small way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po.
They don't speak, I've noticed." "No, they don't. But that Chink's little ways are apt to be indirect. She's afraid of him afraid of the dust under her feet, as you might say." Stires puffed meditatively at his pipe. Then a piratical-looking customer intervened, and I left. Leisurely, all this, and not significant to the unpeeled eye.
And then, within twenty-four hours of the time when I had left Stires, things began to happen. It was as if a tableau had suddenly decided to become a "movie." All those fixed types began to dash about and register the most inconvenient emotions. Let me set down a few facts diary fashion. To begin with, when I got up the next morning, Joe had disappeared. No sign of breakfast, no smell of coffee.
Six hours before, I had not been calm; but now I looked back at that fever with contempt. "She's been to Stires's," he went on; and I could see the words hurt him. "Well, then, ask him." "He was asleep. She left her beloved gramophone there. He found it when he waked." "Her gramophone?" I ejaculated. "Where is Stires?" "Looking for her and hoping he won't find her, curse him!"
Word Of The Day