Page:Weird tales v36n07 1942-09.djvu/31

straightforward simplicity that sometimes makes me despair, while simultaneously admiring him.

"Who says she didn't like it? You damned young meddling cub, what do you know about women?" It was a shout by this time, and Hank now stood beside his chair.

"You don't know anything about women!" he bellowed, thrusting that face, dark with fury, at Peter, who involuntarily took a step backward, astonished. It was, obviously, Peter's first experience with Hank in a full-grown rage. "To prove what I say, I warn you now that when we get back to town Magda, who you think is in love with your yellow hair and blue eyes, will drop you like hot cakes, you young fool."

Peter's face wore the hurt look of a dumb animal which suffers your blows but refrains from striking back in its own way, because it is, after all, constituted along some lines of finer stuff than revengeful human nature can always boast. I saw that he blinked hard once or twice. When he spoke it was in such a gentle voice that I, in turn, blinked rapidly, for it did not sound like the healthily self-confident voice of youth.

"I don't think it's just—well—fair to Magda, to bring her into this, Walters," said Peter in that low, almost ingratiating voice. "Really, we were discussing—"

"I'm telling you that you think you know women, and imagine her in love with you. You don't know a damn about any woman, least of all my ward. I can twist her around my finger, I tell you, and when we get back to the city I'll see to it that you get your congé so swiftly—" Walters left off, chuckling saturninely to himself, but his loose lips curled with cruelty and his narrowed black eyes never left off that fixed stare at Peter's young blond manliness.

Peter, however, slowly turned his stricken gaze to me. I know then that this young blond Apollo was so lacking in the usual masculine conceit that he actually could not believe himself sufficiently attractive, sufficiently worth-while, to hold the beloved woman's loyalty. And no allowance was being made, apparently, for Magda's personal ideas on the subject. It was so astonishing, and to my keen sense of humor so absurd, that I must have failed to demonstrate in my expression the sympathy or the encouragement that Peter had been expecting from me.

Hank blustered on, triumphantly.

"That girl, you young fool, would have been in my arms in another minute if you hadn't come butting into what was none of your business. I know how to handle women, I tell you. They like to be treated rough," shouted he, and burst into a guffaw that had a content of insult for Peter.

I saw that the boy colored. I knew how tenderly reverent were his thoughts about his sweetheart, for once in awhile he had dropped a chance remark that made me love him for his fineness. Hank had dug in, deeply, when he made that final observation.

"That girl—" all at once cried out Peter, as if he could not contain himself, "that girl would have killed you if she'd had a knife or pistol handy, when you tore away her cap and tumbled her glorious hair down over her shoulders. Didn't you see how she tried to push it together and cover it with her hands?"

For a moment my partner's dark mood lightened. A reminiscent smile flickered about his loose lips, drawing them into an expression of complacent irony.

"Kill me, would she? Perhaps—but with kisses, fool."

"Lord!" Peter jerked out, in the throes of such sick disgust that he actually drew up his shoulders, nauseated at that revelation of Hank's character.

His fury turned aside momentarily,