The Uphill Climb | Page 2

the room and mingled with the coarse aroma of
cheap, warmed-over coffee.

"Sandy!"
"Hunh?"
"Did anybody get married last night?" The leash of forgetfulness was
snapping, strand by strand. Troubled remembrance peered out from
behind the philosophic calm in Ford's eyes.
"Unh-hunh." Sandy turned a leaf and at the same time flicked the ashes
from his cigarette with a mechanical finger movement. "You did." He
looked briefly up from the page. "That's why you licked the preacher,"
he assisted, and went back to his reading.
A subdued rumble of mid-autumn thunder jarred sullenly overhead.
Ford ceased caressing the purple half-moon which inclosed his left eye
and began moodily straightening his tie.
"Now what'n hell did I do that for?" he inquired complainingly.
"Search me," mumbled Sandy over his book. He read half a page
farther. "Do what for?" he asked, with belated attention.
Ford swore and went over and lifted the coffeepot from the stove,
shook it, looked in, and made a grimace of disgust as the steam smote
him in the face. "Paugh!" He set down the pot and turned upon Sandy.
"Get your nose out of that book a minute and talk!" he commanded in a
tone beseeching for all its surly growl. "You say I got married. I kinda
recollect something of the kind. What I want to know is who's the lady?
And what did I do it for?" He sat down, leaned his bruised head upon
his palms, and spat morosely into the stove-hearth. "Lordy me," he
grumbled. "I don't know any lady well enough to marry her--and I sure
can't think of any female lady that would marry me--not even by
proxy!"
Sandy closed the book upon a forefinger and regarded Ford with that
blend of pity, amusement, and tolerance which is so absolutely
unbearable to one who has behaved foolishly and knows it. Ford would

not have borne the look if he had seen it; but he was caressing a bruise
on the point of his jaw and staring dejectedly into the meager blaze
which rimmed the lower edge of the stove's front door, and so remained
unconscious of his companion's impertinence.
"Who was the lady, Sandy?" he begged dispiritedly, after a silence.
"Search me" Sandy replied again succinctly. "Some stranger that blew
in here with a license and the preacher and said you was her fee-ancy."
(Sandy read romances, mostly, and permitted his vocabulary to profit
thereby.) "You never denied it, even when she said your name was a
nomdy gair; and you let her marry you, all right."
"Are you sure of that?" Ford looked up from under lowering eyebrows.
"Unh-hunh--that's what you done, all right." Sandy's voice was
dishearteningly positive.
"Lordy me!" gasped Ford under his breath.
There was a silence which slid Sandy's interest back into his book. He
turned a leaf and was half-way down the page before he was
interrupted by more questions.
"Say! Where's she at now?" Ford spoke with a certain furtive lowering
of his voice.
"I d' know." Sandy read a line with greedy interest. "She took the
'leven-twenty," he added then. Another mental lapse. "You seen her to
the train yourself."
"The hell I did!" Ford's good eye glared incredulity, but Sandy was
again following hungrily the love-tangle of an unpronounceable count
in the depths of the Black Forest, and he remained perfectly
unconscious of the look and the mental distress which caused it. Ford
went back to studying the meager blaze and trying to remember. He
might be able to extract the whole truth from Sandy, but that would
involve taking his novel away from him--by force, probably; and the

loss of the book would be very likely to turn Sandy so sullen that he
would refuse to answer, or to tell the truth, at any rate; and Ford's
muscles were very, very sore. He did not feel equal to a scuffle with
Sandy, just then. He repeated something which sounded like an
impromptu litany and had to do with the ultimate disposal of his own
soul.
"Hunh?" asked Sandy.
Whereupon Ford, being harassed mentally and in great physical
discomfort as well, specifically disposed of Sandy's immortal soul also.
Sandy merely grinned at him. "You don't want to take it to heart like
that," he remonstrated cheerfully.
Ford, by way of reply, painstakingly analyzed the chief deficiencies of
Sandy's immediate relatives, and was beginning upon his grandparents
when Sandy reached barren ground in the shape of three long
paragraphs of snow, cold, and sunrise artistically blended with
prismatic adjectives. He waded through the first paragraph and well
into the second before he mired in a hopeless jumble of unfamiliar
polysyllables. Sandy was not the skipping kind; he threw the book upon
a bench and gave his attention wholly to his companion in time to save