Page:The Black Cat November 1916.djvu/38

34 The elevator boy told him on the way down that the home team had scored two runs in the first, and the man behind the cigar stand in the corridor greeted him perfunctorily as he passed. Then Stratton stepped out into the unnoticing crowds of the street. So much for his seven years on the Sentinel.

At his rooms, he sat down and gazed out of the window and smoked. After an hour, he got up and wrote a letter which he took down to the end of the corridor and dropped down the chute. And for the next six days Stratton spent his time sleeping and smoking by the window or wandering about the city park. Much of this new-found leisure was spent in day dreams that a week before he would have found entirely incomprehensible. At the end of six days came an answer to his letter. He tore it open eagerly.

"My dear Fred," it began. Stratton repeated the phrase, the lines of his face crinkling very slowly to a smile. He read on:

Stratton started the next day. The little shop he found unchanged. The editor greeted him at the door, his gray eyes shining and held him at arm's length and chuckled over him as over a son. Stratton wandered slowly about the shop, reconstructing memories; the row of cases along the wall to the left, where he had struggled to mastery over the compositor's art; the cement topped make-up table where, in the early days, he had pied the form of the department store's "Annual Mid-Summer Sale" advertisement and then fled home, convinced that his connection with journalism was henceforth and forever ended. He took a drink at the tin icewater container in the corner and noticed that a thick glass tumbler had taken the place of the cocoanut shell that used to serve. Stratton regretted this. Before going home that evening with the editor, he set two sticks of legal news for the Tuesday issue, bungling it badly for he found his fingers clumsy.

Stratton fell into the old routine quickly. He renewed old acquaintances about town; he set up want ads whistling as he worked; he run the job press, and went about town rustling "locals" which he wrote up in his own pungent style—tiny three-line character sketches, so genial and good-natured, so humanly humorous as to make even the persons they depicted chuckle delightedly at their own foibles.

Fred Stratton settled back into his old niche, which he found very satisfying and restful, and it was some time before he would admit to himself that he was not quite happy. Yet this was true. One by one, during the days since he had returned, he had gathered up the broken threads of his old life; but there was one that eluded him. The thought worried him and he puzzled over it constantly, and, when finally the solution came to him, he laughed outright. That