Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/250

238 camps "tear off" the worried amateur while they converse distractingly of other things. And his whole physical make-up, from his thick ankles to his big shoulders, was as round and strong and smooth as his face.

When a man came up behind him and dropped a hand heavily on one of his shoulders, he did not turn. He finished the page of the register at his leisure and then slanted his head around—to see a stranger, baldish, with white eyelashes and a sort of soggy, fat face.

"You 're a reporter," the man said.

Colburn did not deny it. He rather took it for granted that every one knew it. He returned to his register.

"Do you want to make a hundred dollars?" the stranger asked.

He did, but he did not say so. He had lost thirty-seven dollars, the night previous, playing "loose deuces." He slewed the register back into position for the hotel clerk, detached his cigarette from his lip, and dropped it into a brass spittoon.

The man accepted these movements as implying assent. "Come up to my room," he said.

They crossed the rotunda to the elevator, and Colburn walked in a manner of absent-minded indifference that was habitual with him when his mind was busiest. He had "sized up" the stranger as a mine promoter from the East who had a story he wished to plant on the investing public; and Colburn intended to put the hundred dollars in his pocket—or as much of it as he could get