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The waiter brought the usual plate of shrimps that it was customary to serve with an oyster order, and Starratt and Brauer fell to. A glass of beer foamed with enticing amber coolness before each plate. Brauer reached over and lifted his glass. "Well, here's success to crime!" he said, with pointed facetiousness. Starratt ignored the lead.
Thus mountain cabin succeeded mountain cabin until, presently, one day Fred Starratt found himself swinging down to the plains again to the broad-bosomed valleys lying parched and expectant under the cruel spell of drought. Now people regarded him suspiciously, dogs snapped at his heels, and farmers' women thrust him doles of food through half-opened kitchen doors.
He and Kendricks were placing all the Hilmer insurance. Yes, they were rebating that went without saying. And what else lay at the bottom of Hilmer's generosity? Fred Starratt put the question insinuatingly. Ah yes, the little matter of standing by when Starratt had been sent to Fairview.
He took a delight in cutting the heart and soul out of his victims and reducing them to puppets stuffed with sawdust, answering the slightest pressure of his hands. How completely Fred Starratt understood all this now! And in the blinding flash of this realization he saw also the hidden spring that had answered Storch's pressure.
It was Ford's final summary, the unconscious patronage, the quiet, assured insolence of his words, which gave Starratt his irrevocable cue. "We rather look to men like you, Starratt," Mr. Ford was saying, his voice suave to the point of insincerity, "to tide us over a crisis.
Indeed, he grew so dull that Helen Starratt, stifling a yawn, said: "If it's not too personal ... won't you please tell us ... about ... about the man you killed for smashing your thumb?" He laughed with charming naivete, and began at once. But it was all disappointingly simple. It had happened aboard ship. A hulking Finn, one of the crew's bullies, had accused Hilmer of stealing his tobacco.
Like every human being, they hated what they abused. They wanted to play the game of life with failure eliminated, and the god that they fashioned was a venerable old man who had the skill to worst them, but who genially let them walk away with victory. As Fred Starratt listened day after day to their chatter he withdrew more and more from any mental contact with them.
Hilmer, condemned to feed to the end upon the bitter fruits of hatred ... for his wife, drifting to a pallid fate made up of petty adjustments and compromises. Yes ... he found himself pitying Helen Starratt most of all. Because he had a feeling that she would go on to the end cloaking her primitive impulses in a curious covering of self-deception. She would never understand ... never!
"For a butcher?" Helen countered, with pained incredulity. "How long does your husband work?" Hilmer went on, calmly. "I'm sure I don't know. How long do you work, Fred?" Starratt hesitated. "Let me see ... nine to twelve is three hours ... one to five is four hours seven in all." Hilmer smiled with cryptic irritation. "There you have it!... What's wrong with a butcher wanting eight hours?"
But now he was beyond so conventional a settlement. The huddled meetings about Storch's shattered lamp were no more, but in small groups the scattered malcontents exchanged whispered confidences in any gathering place they chanced upon. Fred Starratt listened to the furtive reports of their activities with morbid interest. But he had to confess that, so far, they were proving empty windbags.
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