Page:Vance--Terence O'Rourke.djvu/28



found the night air soft and balmy, humid but refreshing. He walked with great, limb-stretching strides, throwing back his shoulders and expanding his chest—bathing his lungs, so to speak, with the cleansing atmosphere.

His way led him straight across the city, a walk of no slight distance to his lodgings; but he made a detour to prolong it, to give the exercise an opportunity to clear his brain and steady his nerves—unstrung as they were, from his recent excitement, as from the action of an opiate.

It was later than he began to think; for he could not immediately believe that time had flown so rapidly in the house of Paz. Only the almost deserted streets in which his footsteps echoed loud and lonely, the quietness that lay upon the city, the repose of the gendarmes on the corners, brought home to him the wee smallness of the hour.

He was not sleepy—anything but that; he was very much awake—and yet he was dreaming, holding a "post-mortem" (as he termed it) on his luck and misfortunes of the night, and planning toward his future; or rather, he was striving to solve the riddle of his future, drear and uncompromisingly blank as it then loomed, to his imagination.

For the present—it came to him as a distinct shock—he was exceedingly hungry, and, through his own folly, found himself without the wherewithal to satisfy that young and healthy appetite.