Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/265

Rh "No," promptly Reba replied.

The fat man swung the huge book on top of the desk around to Reba, and dipped a rusty pen into a muddy mixture, in a besmeared inkwell.

Reba laid her left hand prominently upon the desk and wrote with some difficulty, but clearly, "Mrs. Nathaniel Cawthorne, Ridgefield, Mass."

"Oh, missis, is it?" inquired the fat man, after inspecting the signature, and still eyeing his guest curiously. "Well, missis, come up and I'll show yer what we got."

As Reba mounted the creaky flight of stairs she caught a glimpse of the inside of the noisy bar-room, through the open door, and closed her eyes suddenly, as if they had been burned. There were half a dozen or more men in the room, and two girls, or women—at least something in skirts. Reba shuddered and followed the fat man, but she felt such a wave of faintness pass over her that she grasped the infirm railing by her side for support. She followed her guide dumbly (numbly, too, after that) through narrow corridors that turned and turned, to left and right, to right and left, on and on.

Reba had never seen anything in the way of bedrooms that was more repulsive than the hole the fat man finally showed her into. It smelled of stale tobacco, and something else, musty and stifling. There was a long jagged crack across the cheap mirror that was hung askew over a broken-legged set of drawers. The bed was so misshapen and deformed that it recalled to Reba the image of a humpbacked idiot that she had once seen grovelling around the Poor Farm in Ridgefield. Its linen was dirty, too. The