Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/181

 After a time he picked up the battered nickel alarm clock that leaned drunkenly against the caster of his bed and squinted at it. A relic, that alarm clock. Onelegged, and with sketches and legends pock-marking its unglassed face. Just now one hand pointed to a lady with a corncob pipe in her month. The other pointed to "Andover 1918." This meant that the hour lacked fifteen minutes to six.

Bones went to the door, his mouth opened wide to bellow his roommate's name. Encountering Pink Davis on the threshold, he closed it to the degree adapted to propinquity and said, "Seen Jock any place?"

"Not since noon," said Pink.

"Wonder where he is?"

"Still out with the streamline siren, I guess."

"The what? Who you talking about?"

"That's right, you didn't come in till afterward, did you?" Pink recollected. He sat down, hoisted his feet to a table and prepared for oratory. "Say, you should have been here! We're all downstairs waiting for chow, when what should pull up out in front but Buckingham Palace on wheels containing a red-headed baby that would knock your eye out. In the midst of the riot that follows, Jock meanders in, takes one look, and dashes through the door like a bat out of hell. Seems she's a petting acquaintance of his, or whathave—you. Pretty soon he brings her back in with him, and a lot more redskins bite the dust. No foolin', Bones, she was bottled-in-bond stuff, and I don't mean maybe! She stayed a little while, talking to us, and then she and Jock rode off together. And nobody's seen him since."

Bones, who had been listening intently, now waggled a bent-back thumb in the direction of Yvonne's photograph. "That the one?"