The Dark Star

"Yes. Who reads 'em first?"

"Breslau. Or some skirt, maybe."

"What's Breslau?"

"Search me. He's a Dutchman or a Rooshian or some sort of Dodo. What

do you care?"

"I don't. All right, Ben. You've got to show me; that's all."

"Show you what?"

"Spot cash!"

"You're in when you handle it?"

"If you show me real money--yes."

"You're on. I'll cash a cheque of Quint's for you at Monroe's soon as

we hit the asphalt! And when you finish counting out your gold nickels

put 'em in your pants and play the game! Is that right?"

"Yes."

They exchanged a wary handshake; then, one after another, they leaned

back in their seats with the air of honest men who had done their

day's work.

Curfoot blinked at Brandes, at his excessively groomed person, at his

rings.

"You look prosperous, Eddie."

"It's his business to," remarked Stull.

Brandes yawned: "It would be a raw deal if there's a war over here," he said

listlessly.

"Ah," said Curfoot, "there won't be none."

"Why?"

"The Jews and bankers won't let these kinks mix it."

"That's right, too," nodded Brandes.

But Stull said nothing and his sour, pasty visage turned sourer. It

was the one possibility that disturbed him--the only fly in the

amber--the only mote that troubled his clairvoyance. Also, he was the

only man among the three who didn't think a thing was certain to

happen merely because he wanted it to happen.

There was another matter, too, which troubled him. Brandes was

unreliable. And who but little Stull should know how unreliable?

For Brandes had always been that. And now Stull knew him to be more

than that--knew him to be treacherous.

Whatever in Brandes had been decent, or had, blindly perhaps, aspired

toward decency, was now in abeyance. Something within him had gone to

smash since Minna Minti had struck him that night in the frightened

presence of Rue Carew.

And from that night, when he had lost the only woman who had ever

stirred in him the faintest aspiration to better things, the man had

gradually changed. Whatever in his nature had been unreliable became

treacherous; his stolidity became sullenness. A slow ferocity burned

within him; embers of a rage which no brooding ever quenched slumbered

red in his brain until his endless meditation became a monomania. And

his monomania was the ruin of this woman who had taken from him in the

very moment of consummation all that he had ever really loved in the

world--a thin, awkward, freckled, red-haired country girl, in whom,

for the first and only time in all his life, he saw the vague and

phantom promise of that trinity which he had never known--a wife, a

child, and a home.

He sat there by the car window glaring out of his dull green eyes at

the pleasant countryside, his thin lips tightening and relaxing on his

cigar.