"Lawrence Treat - Fortunes Fadeaway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Treat Lawrence)

Select Stories, March 1942




but even so, he might have been more sociable.
“The Perfect Jinx!” the headlines named
Instead, he gazed with those wistful, apologetic
him—and they were right.
eyes, and said nothing. I needed distraction, and
here I was committed to carry a little wooden
By Lawrence Treat
puppet for two hundred miles.


H E HAS to be somewhere. A slight, stoop- After a time, I became conscious of a straining
shouldered little man, bald, subdued, and a concentration radiating from him, almost like
meek, with thin delicate nostrils and a a new sound against the monotony of rain and
quiet resignation in his brown eyes. He gives the motor and swishing tires. His fists were clenched
impression of apologizing for himself, as if he had into little pink bows and his lips were knotted in a
no right to be with you but just couldn’t resist the bud of repression. Suddenly, as we passed a cross
temptation. He likes people, you see. road, he almost jumped out of his seat.
If you ever come across anyone like that, ask his “That’s it!” he exclaimed.
name. There’s always a chance it may be Bogan. “That’s what?”
Harley Bogan. “The place where it started.”
I’d been driving since eight that morning, and I I coaxed him with a “Yes?” and waited. I could
wanted company. The rain was slapping like a feel him fighting it, the story he didn’t want to tell
miniature barrage on the windshield and the wiper lest I throw him out in the rain. And for good
blades couldn’t click fast enough. The tires were reason, too.
making a steady swish and I could see their gray But it had to come, and it did. In jerks, in sighs,
disappearing tracks in the mirror. in dropped words as he tried to swallow it down.
He was a forlorn, bedraggled figure standing “It was years ago,” he said. “I had a dog with
under a tree at the top of the hill. He didn’t bother me. A little brown mutt that used to curl up around
to thumb me. He simply stared, like a dog that my toes and keep my feet warm at night. I like
wants to come inside the house and knows it can’t. dogs,” he added eagerly, “and I liked Lady
So he stared, and I could feel the appeal in him. particularly.”
He seemed tired and hungry and wet and I was He bit his lips and rubbed them with his fingers
sorry for him, but a few minutes after I’d picked as if to massage back the tale, but it had started
him up I began being sorry for myself. I spouted now and he was powerless.
my piece about how I was on my way to Baltimore “I was standing there,” he continued, “hoping a
for the trial flight of that new plane. My name truck or a wagon would come along. My clothes
would be on the select passenger list and the were too ragged for anything else. I’d been
publicity meant cash. I crowed too much, perhaps, sleeping in the fields, with Lady to keep my feet
 SELECT STORIES 2

warm. So when the big car came along I didn’t furnace flue that backed up. They blamed it on
even get up. But Lady scampered out on the road Bogan, too. You see, he himself never suffered. It
and I couldn’t help myself. I yelled and then I was always his companion, the other man in the
dived for him and that’s all I remember. car.
“I learnt later on that the fender had struck me I looked ahead. We were passing a desolate