"Here, you take it, if--if you'll sleep the sounder. And don't you
worry over me. I'll see you in the morning, Steve."
CHAPTER XIV
A GIRL LIKE HER
Save for a short and casual "see you in the morning, Garry," Stephen
O'Mara turned without a word that night and left the improvised
sleeping-quarters in the storehouse shack. It was a man's
leave-taking, short to abruptness, so badly stereotyped that it denied
utterly any consciousness of threatened, reckless tragedy and cordially
intimate only because in all man-to-man speech there is less and less
of actual sincerity in a multiplicity of words. But he might have
talked till daylight and still have failed to register the binding
acceptance of Garry's promise, which his silence, unaided, achieved.
Soundlessly, unemotionally, Steve closed the door on that figure on the
bunk edge which, suddenly slack of limb and shoulder, had averted its
face. But then, there in the darkness, with the gun swinging heavily
between loose fingers, he hesitated in his very first step back from
the threshold. And twice, head bowed in indecision, he halted in his
slow progress from that door to the lighted one of his own cabin which
framed Fat Joe's immobile form--halted each time as though he would
return--and each time went slowly forward again. Fat Joe's eyes barely
flitted over Steve's face that night; they clung in a fixed, pale blue
stare of fear to the weapon in his hand.
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