Broken to the Plow | Page 3

thrust two lean, bloodless fingers into his vest pocket and drew out a crisp note.
"Thanks, awfully," Starratt said, quickly, as he reached for the money.
Brauer's face lit up with a swift glow of satisfaction. Starratt almost shrank back. He felt a clammy hand pressing the bill against his palm.
"Thanks, awfully," he murmured again.
Brauer dropped his eyes with a suggestion of unpleasant humility.
"I wish," flashed through Starratt's mind, "that I had asked for ten dollars."
* * * * *
As Fred Starratt came down the steps leading from the California Market with a bottle of oyster cocktails held gingerly before him he never remembered when he had been less in the mood for guests. A passing friend invited him to drop down for a drink at Collins & Wheeland's, but the state of his finances urged a speedy flight home instead. At this hour the California Street cars were crowded, but he managed to squeeze into a place on the running board. He always enjoyed the glide of this old-fashioned cable car up the stone-paved slope of Nob Hill, and even the discomfort of a huddled foothold was more than discounted by the ability to catch backward glimpses of city and bay falling away in the slanting gold of an early spring twilight like some enchanted and fabulous capital.
At Hyde Street he changed cars, continuing his homeward flight in the direction of Russian Hill. He prided himself on the fact that he still clung to one of the old quarters of the town, scorning the outlying districts with all the disdain of a San Franciscan born and bred of pioneer stock. He liked to be within easy walking distance of work, and only a trifle over fifteen minutes from the shops and cafés and theaters. And his present quarters in a comparatively new apartment house just below the topmost height of Green Street answered these wishes in every particular.
On the Hyde Street car he found a seat, and, without the distraction of maintaining his foothold or the diversion of an unfolding panorama, his thoughts turned naturally on his immediate problems. The five dollars had gone a ridiculously small way. Four oyster cocktails came to a dollar and a quarter, and he had to have at least six cigars at twenty-five cents apiece. This left him somewhat short of the maid's wage of three dollars for cooking and serving dinner and washing up the dishes. If Helen had engaged Mrs. Finn, everything would be all right. She knew them and she would wait. Still, he didn't like putting anybody off--he was neither quite too poor nor quite too affluent to be nonchalant in his postponement of obligations.
When he arrived home he found that Helen had been having her troubles, too. Mrs. Finn had disappointed her and sent a frowsy female, who exuded vile whisky and the unpleasant odors of a slattern.
"I think she's half drunk," Helen had confessed, brutally. "You can't depend on anyone these days. Servants are getting so independent!"
The roast had been delivered late, too, and when Helen had called up the shop to protest she had been met with cool insolence.
"I told the boy who talked to me that I'd report him to the boss. And what do you suppose he said? 'Go as far as you like! We're all going out on a strike next week, so we should worry!' Fancy a butcher talking like that to me! I don't know what things are coming to."
Frankly, neither did Fred Starratt, but he held his peace. He was thinking just where he would gather enough money together to pay Mrs. Finn's questionable substitute.
The guests arrived shortly and there were the usual stiff, bromidic greetings. Mrs. Hilmer had been presented to Fred first ... a little, spotless, homey Scandinavian type, who radiated competent housekeeping and flawless cooking. The Starratts had once had just such a shining-faced body for a neighbor--a woman who ran up the back stairs during the dinner hour with a bit of roasted chicken or a pan of featherweight pop-overs or a dish of crumbly cookies for the children. Mrs. Starratt, senior, had acknowledged her neighbor's culinary merits ungrudgingly, tempering her enthusiasm, however, with a swift dab of criticism directed at the lady's personality.
"My, but isn't she Dutch, though!" frequently had escaped her.
Somehow the characterization had struck Fred Starratt as very apt even in his younger days. And as he shook hands with Mrs. Hilmer these same words came to mind.
Hilmer disturbed him. He was a huge man with a rather well-chiseled face, considering his thickness of limb, and his blond hair fell in an untidy shower about his prominent and throbbing temples. Fred felt him to be a man without any inherited social graces, yet he contrived to appear at ease. Was it because he was disposed