The She Boss | Page 7

the table and stumbled noisily into a seat. The girl, now
holding out a menu card, was looking at him curiously, he felt. The
blood rushed to his face; he dared not look at her. Fumblingly he took
the card and straightway dropped it on the floor.
Together they bent over to regain it. Their bodies touched. Hiram grew
sick. She recovered the card and was standing erect when he
crawfished up from the floor. He was burning up with shame. Again he
took the card, but his glazed eyes could not read a word.
Suddenly he knew that she was speaking.
"I think you'd like a ribber, medium," she was saying, "with French
fries and a dish of peas."
Hiram's head nodded without command. He knew she was leaving the
table, and something forced his eyes to her. She was turning, but her

eyes were looking back into his. In those eyes, big and brown beneath
dark, arched brows and long lashes, there was a look that thrilled him
to his soul. She was more beautiful than any woman he had seen
through all the splendor of the night, and she had flashed to him a spark
of kindness in a maelstrom of misery! Was this the girl who had been
beckoning him on?
She was coming back. She paused beside him and placed a napkin,
silver, bread and butter, and a glass of water before him. He tried to
look up, but could not. He felt her close to him as she arranged the
things before him.
She was speaking again, low, soothingly.
"Awful crowd to-night. We don't usually put single gentlemen on this
side, but I guess you won't mind. Your ribber'll be here in a minute."
She was gone again. He saw her brown hair bobbing toward the kitchen.
He watched the swing doors, eager for her return.
They burst open at last and she came forward and placed a big platter
before him, on which steamed an enormous rib steak, beside this a dish
of French-fried potatoes and a dish of peas.
She glided away once more and did not again come near his table while
he ate. He kept his eyes on her throughout the meal, and continued to
lower them when he thought her about to look toward him. His "ribber"
was good, and he ate the last scrap. Then he paid his bill and hurried
out.
Through the window he looked back for her. She was nowhere in sight.
In a miserable hallway on the second floor of a dingy brick building, he
obeyed the legend over a button in the wall, which read:
"Landlord--push the button." The result was that a squint-eyed man
came from a door marked "office" and yawningly asked him his
business. Hiram wished a twenty-five-cent room, he said. He was taken
to one, which was not a room at all, but a stall--that is, the thin board

partitions did not connect with the ceiling by three feet. The bed was a
single one, and the sheets had brought the proprietor many a
twenty-five-cent piece since coming from the laundry. The additional
furnishings of the "room" were six nails driven in the board wall to
hold one's clothes. From all over the floor came lusty snores and the
mutterings of world-worn men.
With the city smells still in his nostrils, the buzz of city life still in his
ears, and the countless lights twinkling in a frame about the white face
of a brown-haired, red-lipped girl, he fell asleep from sheer fatigue. But
with unaccountable perversity his dreaming mind dwelt not upon the
beautiful vision he had come to love in fifteen seconds, but on the
whispering firs and twinkling streams of Mendocino, and on a plodding
ten-horse jerkline team hauling tanbark over the mountains to the coast.
CHAPTER IV
TWITTER OR TWEET
Hiram Hooker washed in the community lavatory in the hall next
morning. Then he sought the squint-eyed landlord and paid a week's
room rent in advance, thereby saving fifty cents.
He wished to strike out at once after breakfast to begin justifying Uncle
Sebastian's faith in him, but so far he had not laid a plan. He noticed
lettering on a door in the hall which dignified what lay beyond as a
"lounging room." The door stood ajar, and he saw that the room was
empty. He decided to go in and think. A thousand and one wonders
awaited his curious eyes, but they must wait. His hundred dollars had
dwindled perceptibly; it was time to give his future a practical thought
or two.
In the "lounging room" were a long plain board writing-table, ten
yellow kitchen chairs. Hiram took a seat by a window overlooking
Kearny Street.
He could not plan, he found, for his ideas