Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/149

 "I know. I will, Jock." She was passive now—broken. "Come back soon," she whispered.

"In an hour or two," he promised.

On his way out they let him pause in the quiet room across the hall for a little while. ..

Back at the fraternity house Bones Allen met him at the door and demanded immediately, with mingled fear and curiosity in his wide eyes, "Did you see him?"

And Jock said a queer thing, which he afterward never quite understood. He said, "No. He wasn't there."

Brad had written:

"Jock old man, I couldn't go without leaving you some word. You'll wonder why I'm doing it, and I want to try to make you see.

"I had to have money. I had to, to make Eunice happy. She was miserable married to a poor man, having to do without things. She stood it for years, but this fall she began saying she was sick of it, and that she was going to leave me. I didn't blame her for that, but I loved her so, Jock, I couldn't have stood it if she'd gone away. I had to think of something. I had to have money, and there was only one way to get a lot of it quick, and that was bootlegging. People were making fortunes at it, and nobody knew. That was the part that appealed to me. It was sure-fire, and nobody would know.

"So I started. I had another man working with me, out of town. He did all the dirty work, and I backed him and took my share of the proceeds. I had a little money, enough to start on. It doesn't take much to start in that game. I won't pretend I liked it. I didn't, I hated it. But if they didn't get it from me they'd get it somewhere else. That was what I tried to think of. Remember that night you saw me at the nigger joint, Jock? I was wait-