Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/140

 into the clouded murk of a bottom land night would stand by him whenever he should attempt to add a paragraph of description to his specials about river people. If he should ever write a fiction story, he would never need to fake a description of river dark.

"She was just a pretty girl, and alone!" he repeated from Gost's shrewdly veiling narrative. "She had her doors unlocked and swinging."

Urleigh, unprejudiced, a thorough newspaper reporter, and skilled in deduction, repeated that last sentence:

"She had her doors unlocked and swinging!"

He studied that fact, for he saw that it fixed one phase of the girl's character; her smile, as she shot, fixed another phase.

"She was ready for him," Urleigh decided. "Instead of locking the doors to keep him out, she knew a better way: she left them swinging, so that if she had to, she could run out on the bow, or over the stern. She's a brave, level-headed girl!"

It was a nice bit of deductive reasoning and Urleigh was well satisfied by his conclusion. Gost accused her of leading him on, and teasing him to overstep the bounds of all propriety, whether up the bank or down the lower river. Urleigh studied that phase a long time.

"That may be the story!" he told himself. "I sure