Miss Warren was a pocket-size taffy blonde with an amazingly beautiful figure encased in an evening gown that fitted her like the skin on a weenie. She was moderately drunk. Her face didn’t quite go with the figure; it was a doll’s face, and it was easy to see that she wouldn’t be a stimulating conversationalist during the long winter evenings. But for long winter evenings without conversation—

  “…have, Whit?” Kitty said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, Lorenzo wants us to have a drink.”

  Whit brought his mind back from the long winter evenings with Miss Warren. The Latin menace might be something of a wolf at that, if he could get Kitty to call him by his first name in the time he had known her.

  “Thanks.” He calculated his losses quickly. “How about some champagne? I feel like celebrating.”

  “Certainly. We’ll all celebrate. What’s the occasion?” Lorenzo raised his hand, beckoning to a waiter.

  “I’m about to be drafted.” Whit hadn’t expected his suggestion of champagne to be taken seriously. “You order, but it’s on me. I’ll buy it out of my losses.”

  “Not at all. This is with the compliments of the house. Nothing is too good for the armed forces.”

  Lorenzo gave an order to the waiter who had come up in answer to his signal.

  At that point Whit’s low suspicious mind began to make ticking noises. He was willing to believe that there were gamblers who either didn’t mind having the suckers win once in a while or who could put up a front that it wasn’t breaking their hearts. But champagne for a pair of strangers, when one of the strangers had already tagged the bank for a couple of hundred dollars? A Mickey Finn, maybe, not champagne. Not unless there was a reason for it. Maybe the guy was a wolf.

  The waiter arrived with the bottle in an ice-basket. It was good champagne, and very expensive. Whit took a closer look at Kitty’s new acquaintances while they drank.

  Caldwell and the blonde girl were bucking the wheel, following Kitty’s plays and making money at it. The blonde giggled at something Caldwell said as he reached across the table to stack counters on a number. Whit’s eyes followed Caldwell’s hand. The fingers showed the same scrubbed griminess that Whit had seen on Walter Gates’ hands, earlier that evening.

  Things began to make a hazy sort of picture after that. It was hard to tell what the picture meant, but Walter Gates and Caldwell were together in it somewhere. Two non-laboring men in the same evening, both with dirty hands and both interested in the same strangers, seemed like more than a coincidence. In San Francisco, it would have been an even chance that they were both patriotically handling a shift in the shipyards in their spare time. But in Reno there were no shipyards. And even if there were some legitimate dirty work they could have had their hands in, why free champagne?

  Whit looked at Lorenzo’s hands, one of which was then resting on Kitty’s arm. The nails were clean and beautifully manicured.

  The croupier spun his wheel and the little ball went round and round. Kitty laughed as Lorenzo pretended concern over his losses. Whit smiled mechanically and thought, God, I’m getting imaginative. I guess I need some sleep.

  He drank another mouthful of Lorenzo’s good wine.

  Sleep or no sleep, the champagne was the real McCoy. It was too good to give away without an equally good reason for it. But what reason was there? Whit and Kitty were harmless; people had no cause to get itchy trigger fingers because of them, or buy them champagne either. Yet in the last three hours Walter Gates, his man Kohler, Lorenzo and Caldwell had all developed sudden interests because an accountant and his girl had come to Reno to be married. Something was very smelly somewhere.

  Whit listened carefully to the talk around the table for a while, and kept his eyes open. Nothing was said or done that meant anything. He did learn that the blonde’s name was Gladys, that she didn’t like the way Lorenzo was bending his profile at Kitty, and that she was counter-attacking by turning her glamour loose on Caldwell, whose name was Jess and who was stone-blind to glamour, in a polite way. Gladys couldn’t understand it. Neither could Whit. If Gladys were to blink her big beautiful eyes at him the way she did at Jess Caldwell, he would at least be gentleman enough to give her some encouragement. But Caldwell, damn him, did nothing at all. He was polite with everyone, his conversation was amusing and without significance, and he did nothing. He was just there, with his dirty fingernails.

  It began to get tiresome after a while, waiting for something to happen that didn’t happen. Whit looked at his watch and put his empty glass in the ice bucket.

  “You’ve made expenses for one night, Kitty. Let’s move along. It’s after eight o’clock.”

  The objections were immediate and unanimous from the other roulette players. A rabbit’s foot like Kitty didn’t turn up every night. If Whit took her away, he would be taking money right out of their pockets.

  “It’s the first time I’ve won in years,” Gladys complained. “I don’t see why you have to go now.”

  Jess Caldwell joined in with his protest. “Oh, wait a while. In another hour I’ll get back all I’ve paid Lorenzo in the last three months.”

  “Maybe I should go before we take all of your money, Lorenzo,” Kitty said apologetically.

  Lorenzo shrugged and smiled. “It’s there to take. A good gambler never leaves while he’s winning.”

  Kitty looked questioningly at Whit.

  “Me or the roulette wheel,” he said. “I’ve been up two nights in a row. If you want to accomplish anything today, you’d better move. We’ve got to get a license and find a justice of the peace before I fall asleep on my feet.”

  “So the secret is finally out,” Caldwell said. “You’re getting married.”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “In that case, I withdraw my objection. And to make sure you don’t get led astray. I’ll go with you.” He pushed his counters across the table to the banker. “Cash me in.”

  Gladys said promptly, “Lorenzo isn’t much fun anymore, and I love weddings. I’m going, too.”

  There was no way to avoid them without being deliberately nasty, so Whit said nothing. Kitty did not seem to mind. Lorenzo was sorry he had to stay behind, but he had a business to take care of. Whit rather thought he had hoped to take care of the blonde as well, before the party was over. Lorenzo gave Caldwell a dirty look as Gladys attached herself to Caldwell. But Lorenzo was a good loser, as far as money went. He flashed his teeth at Kitty and invited her – and her husband, of course – to come back and take more of his money whenever she felt like it. He would be glad to see her any time – and her husband, of course.

  Whit said, “Yeh, sure.”

  Kitty was still full of life when they left the club with their new friends. Whit did his best to liven up a bit, but it was a hard job. He was dog-tired, the drinks had worn off, and he felt a gloomy premonition that Caldwell had a reason for clinging to them like a limpet on a rock. Every time he looked at Caldwell’s hands he thought of Gates, and every time he thought of Gates he saw weasel-face Kohler with his hands in the pockets of the black overcoat. It was a hell of a state of mind for a man about to be married.

  The colored doorman outside the club tootled his whistle for a cab as the party came down the steps, and grinned and bobbed his head as Caldwell put a bill in his white glove. Whit’s car was a block up the street. He weighed the number of gas tickets in his ration book against the possibility that he and Kitty were about to be snatched by Caldwell and the cab-driver, and decided that if there was going to be a snatch there was going to be a snatch. There was no sense in wasting his gasoline on his own kidnapping.

  He felt faintly amused by his own morbid thoughts while he stood with Kitty waiting for a cab in the bright early morning sunshine. Another hour without sleep and he’d develop a persecution complex. Then the pair of cowboys who were clumping up the street in high-heeled boots would be carrying poisoned lollipops to ram down his throat, the sad-looking tart down the block would be a Japanese spy in disguise, and the frowsy bum loafing in the sunlight across the street—

  Whit’s wandering eyes jerked back to the frowsy bum across the street. He was staring intently at the man when their cab drew up to the curb and cut off his view. He disengaged his arm from Kitty’s with a mumbled excuse.

  Kitty said, “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  The shabby man across the street was walking away as Whit came around the front of the cab and started towards him. Whit was still twenty feet away when the shabby man turned into a doorway and was gone. He had not looked back.

  Whit was right at his heels. The doorway led into a dingy bar smelling of stale beer and cigar-butts. The only person in sight when Whit entered the place was a pale man swamping the linoleum floor with a mop.

  “What happened to the guy that just came in here?” Whit asked.

  The pale man looked up. “Huh?”

  “What happened to the guy that just came in, five seconds ago?”

  The pale man jerked an indifferent thumb towards the back of the bar-room and went on with his swamping.

  Whit followed the thumb, but it was too late. A door in the back of the place opened on to an alley, and the shabby man was nowhere in sight.

  Whit said thoughtfully, “I’ll be god damned.”

  CHAPTER 5

  WHIT walked back to the cab pondering over a new mystery.

  Casey Jones was the rounder’s name. That was how the song went, about the brave railroad engineer who whistled for the crossing with an awful shrill and found Number 4 staring him right in the face. It had been on the Reno hill, too. Quite a coincidence. The Casey Jones Whit knew had been an engineer also; not an engine-driver, but an electrical engineer and a good one. Whit had known him well in San Francisco, up until two or three years before. They and a newspaperman who was a kindred soul had lunched together occasionally, played handball at the gymnasium, and caroused more or less regularly. The combination had broken up when the newspaperman went to New York and Casey gave up a good private practice to accept some kind of a travelling job that took him away from California. Whit hadn’t known exactly what the new job was, although Casey had been pretty hot for it. It had a future. But the future hadn’t panned out so well, because Casey either had a double wandering around loose or Whit had just seen him on the bum in Reno.

  He was still puzzling over it when he got back to the cab. Kitty said, “Why did you suddenly lope away like that?”

  “Thought I saw someone I used to know.”

  “Oh?” Kitty’s normal curiosity was bothering her.

  “I was wrong.”

  Sure he had been wrong. It was just a chance resemblance. Casey, whatever might happen to him and however he might go to the dogs, would never end up as dirty as the tramp had been.

  Casey was a soap-and-water fiend. The guy across the street hadn’t even shaved for four or five days.

  “I thought the groom was leaving you in the lurch,” the blonde said to Kitty. “My third husband almost did that. He got cold feet.”

  “Your third husband?” Kitty looked at the blonde in surprise. Gladys was still on the green side of thirty.

  Gladys giggled. “I think it was my third. I lose track sometimes.”

  Whit said, “I won’t run away. But there’s a good chance I’ll pass out unless we get started. Get going, driver.”

  “Where to?” The driver was patient with him. “I ain’t psychic, mister.”

  “The county clerk’s office.”

  The cab took off. Kitty and Gladys got into a discussion of the subject of trousseaux, with Caldwell arguing the male critic’s point of view. Whit closed his eyes and thought about Casey Jones.

  After all, there was still something wrong with the theory that the tramp hadn’t been Casey. Why had he turned away when Whit started across the street? That disappearance into the saloon and out the back door could only have been for the purpose of getting away from Whit, and why would a stranger give a hoot because somebody came across the street in his direction? It was damn queer. Everything about this trip was queer. First it was Pop and his two thugs, then Lorenzo and the Caldwell limpet who seemed determined to accompany Whit and Kitty right to the nuptial bed, then the tramp who couldn’t be Casey Jones but was. It was a hell of a situation, all around.

  Whit yawned.

  He was almost asleep when the cab stopped. The driver said, “Here y’are. D’you want I should wait? I can find you a J.P. faster’n anybody in town.”

  “I thought you weren’t psychic,” Kitty said. “How do you know we’re going to be married?”

  The cab driver grinned at her as he opened the door. “You just don’t look like you’d be interested in anything the county clerk can sell you except a marriage license, mam.”

  “Time is of the essence,” Whit said. He yawned again. “Stick around. We’ll be right out.”

  The wedding ceremony was performed by a cadaverous justice of the peace with bad breath and a falsetto voice. He had a working arrangement with the cab driver which made them both quite a bit of money, partly because the J.P.’s place of business was two good miles from the county clerk’s office and partly because he put so much bogus enthusiasm into his work that brand-new husbands felt guilty if they gave him less than ten dollars.

  “Oh, fine, fine,” he piped, jockeying Whit and Kitty into the proper position for the operation. “Now the witnesses, please.” He pointed a bony finger at Caldwell and the blonde. They stepped forward. “That’s fine. Just fine. Now, let’s see. The license? Fine. The ring? Fine.” He produced a worn prop Bible, let it fall open at random, and cleared his throat.

  “Now if the bride and groom will clasp hands, please. Fine, fine.” His voice dropped two octaves in honor of the solemn occasion. “James Whitney, do you take Kathryn McLeod for your lawful wedded wife?…”

  They were married.

  Whit kissed Kitty, then Gladys, and then Kitty again to make sure that she still tasted better than anyone else. She did. She was inclined to weep when she looked at the ring on her finger, and had to blow her nose once or twice. Whit wished that Gladys and the limpet weren’t around so he could say something nice to her. He compromised by inconspicuously patting her bottom. She smiled tearily at him.

  “Fine, fine,” said the justice of the peace, not referring to the pat. His voice was back to its normal squeak. “Congratulations. I’m sure you’re going to be the happiest pair in the world.”

  “We are.” Whit gave him twenty dollars. “Thanks a lot.”

  He hurried Kitty away while the J.P. was looking at the twenty and trying to figure out what he could give them in the way of an encore.

  Their driver still waited for them, contentedly listening to the ticking of his meter. They all got into the cab. The driver said, “Happy landings, chums. Where to now?”

  “A hotel.” Whit was having trouble with his eyelids.

  “Which one?”

  “Any one. Use your own judgment.”

  Gladys said, “You might as well go to the Truckee, then. That’s where I’m staying. I’m beginning to need my beauty sleep too.” She batted her eyes at Caldwell. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Of course not. It’s time we all went to bed.”

  Gladys looked disappointed. She and Caldwell didn’t see eye to eye on the subject.

  Whit said, “Where can we drop you, Caldwell?”

  “I’ll go to the hotel with you and take the cab from there, thanks.”

  Whit had expected the limpet to struggle more when it was pried loose. It surprised him that Caldwell had lost interest in clinging to them, now that they were married. Caldwell was still as friendly and pleasant as ever, but his attitude was indefinably different. He dropped them at the hotel with a cordial good-bye and congratulations, and left without even trying to sign up the blonde for a date. Gladys was so indignant that she flounced away to her beauty sleep with hardly a farewell for the bride and groom.

  The bride and groom came very near to being thrown out of the hotel before they even got in it. First of all, their bags were still in Whit’s car, several blocks down the street, and the clerk naturally thought the worst of people without luggage. Whit got around that by giving the clerk his keys, describing the car, and asking that somebody be sent to pick it up. But the clerk’s eyebrows went up again when he looked at Whit’s signature on the registration card.

  “The lady, sir. Do you wish two rooms, or—?”

  He let the question hang delicately in mid-air.

  Whit flushed a dull red as he retrieved the card and added ‘Mr. and Mrs.” before his name. Kitty looked off in the distance. The clerk eyed them knowingly, shook his head at the clumsiness of people who thought they could fool an old hand, and rang for a bellhop.

  At long last the newlyweds were alone in their room. The hotel stood on the bank of the river that bisected the town; five stories below their window the stream made a murmuring noise as it flowed between the carefully kept grassy lawns that were Reno’s pride. A warm breeze stirred the curtains of the window, and a patch of sunlight lay across the carpeted floor. It was quiet and very peaceful. Whit yawned tremendously.

  “You certainly made a fool of yourself with the registration,” Kitty said as she took off her hat. It was a new hat, and she was proud of it. Whit thought it looked like a banana-split, but he hadn’t said so.

  “My mind was on something else.”

  “What?”

  “Guess.” Whit leered at her.

  Kitty scoffed. “You acted like a schoolboy sowing his first wild oat. I’ll bet you never took another woman to a hotel in your life.”

  “Bet I have.”