The Lookout Man, B. M. Bower [free ebooks for android .TXT] 📗

be rung by the user; or if he had been told that he had forgotten. So he waited, his ears strained to catch the heavenly sound of a human voice.

Shame crept in on the panic of his soul; shame and something that stiffened it into the courage of a man. He felt his cheeks burn with the flush that stained them, and he slowly lowered the receiver into its hook.

With his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his mouth pulled down at the corners, he stood leaning back against the desk shelf and forced himself to look down across the wooded slopes to the valley, where a light twinkled now like a fallen star. After a while he found that he could see once more the beauty, and not so much the loneliness. Then, just to prove to himself that he was not going to be bluffed by the silence, he began to whistle. And the tune carried with it an impish streak of that grim humor in which, so they tell us, the song was born. It is completely out of date now, that song, but then it was being sung around the world. And sometimes it was whistled just as Jack was whistling it now, to brace a man's courage against the press of circumstances.

"It's a long way to Tipperary," sang Jack, when he had whistled the chorus twice; and grinned at the joke upon himself. After that he began to fuss with the oil stove and to experiment with the food they had left him, and whistled deliberately all the while.

In this wise Jack Corey lost himself from his world and entered into his exile on a mountain top.

CHAPTER SIX

 

MISS ROSE FORWARD

 

Times were none too prosperous with the Martha Washington Beauty Shop, upon the sixth floor of a Broadway building. In the hairdressing parlor half the long rows of chairs reached out empty arms except during the rush hours of afternoon; even then impatient patrons merely sprinkled the room with little oases of activity while the girls busied themselves with tidying shelves already immaculate, and prinking before the mirrors whenever they dared. An air of uncertainty pervaded the place, swept in by the rumor that the shop was going to cut down its force of operators. No one knew, of course, the exact truth of the matter, but that made it all the worse.

"'For one shall be taken and the other left,'" a blonde girl quoted into a dismal little group at the window that looked out over the city. "Has any one heard any more about it?"

"Rumley has been checking up the appointment lists, all morning," a short, fat girl with henna-auburn hair piled high on her head reported cheerfully. "Of course, you could never get a word out of her—but I know what she is up to. The girls that have the most steady patrons will stay, of course. I'm certainly glad I kidded that old widow into thinking she's puhfectly stunning with her hair hennaed. She don't trust anybody but me to touch it up. And she's good for a scalp and facial and manicure every week of her life, besides getting her hair dressed every Saturday anyway, and sometimes oftener when she's going out. And she always has a marcelle after a shampoo. She'd quit coming if I left—she told me so last week. She thinks I'm there on massages. And then I've got sevrul others that ask for me regular as they come in. You know that big, fat—"

"Miss Rose forward," the foreman's crisp, businesslike voice interrupted.

Miss Rose began nervously pulling her corn-colored hair into the latest plastered effect on her temples. "This isn't any appointment. I wonder if somebody asked for me, or if Rumley—"

"Well, kid her along, whoever she is, and talk a lot about her good points. You never can tell when some old girl is going to pull a lot of patronage your way," the fat girl advised practically. "Tell 'em your name and suggest that they call for you next time. You've got to get wise to the trick of holding what you get. Beat it, kiddo—being slow won't help you none with Rumley, and she's got the axe, remember."

Thus adjured, Miss Rose beat it, arriving rather breathlessly at her chair, which was occupied by a rather sprightly looking woman with pretty hands and a square jaw and hair just beginning to gray over the temples. She had her hat off and was regarding herself seriously in the mirror, wondering whether she should touch up the gray, as some of her intimate friends advised, or let it alone as her brother Fred insisted.

Miss Rose was too busy counting customers to notice who was in her chair until she had come close.

"Why, hello, Kate," she said then. "I was just wondering what had become of you."

"Oh, I've been so busy, Marion. I just had to steal the time today to come. You weren't out to my reading last night, and I was afraid you might not be well. Do you think that I ought to touch up my hair, Marion? Of course, I don't mind it turning, so much—but you know appearance counts everything with an audience until one begins to speak. Fred says to leave it alone—"

"Well, you do it." Miss Rose leaned over the chair with a handful of hairpins to place in the little box on the dressing shelf, and spoke confidentially in the ear of her patron. "It's not my business to knock the trade, Kate—but honestly, that sign up there, that says 'Hair Dyed at Your Own Risk' ought to say, 'to your own sorrow.' If you start, you've got to keep it up or it looks simply frightful. And if you keep it up it just ruins your hair. You have such nice hair, Kate!" She picked up a sterilized brush and began stroking Kate's hair soothingly. It was not such nice hair. It was very ordinary hair of a somewhat nondescript color; but Kate was her dearest friend, and praise is a part of the profession. "What do you want?—a scalp, shampoo, or just dressed, or a curl, or what?"

"What," Kate retorted pertly. "Just fuss around while I talk to you, Marion. I—"

"Rumley won't stand for fussing. I've got to do something she can recognize across the room. How about a scalp? You can talk while I massage, and then I'll show you a perfectly stunning way to do your hair—it's new, and awfully good for your type of face. How do you like mine today?"

"Why, I like it tremendously!" Kate gave her an appraising glance in the mirror. "It's something new, isn't it? Use plenty of tonic, won't you, Marion? They charge awful prices here—but their tonic has done my hair so much good! Listen, could you get off early today? I simply must talk to you. A perfectly tremendous opportunity has literally fallen our way, and I want you to benefit by it also. A friend of Douglas'—of Professor Harrison's, I should say—called our attention to it. This friend wants to go in on it, but he can't leave