Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 18, 1928 — page 139: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE HARDER RIGHT. He liked the colonel, too, for making himself a negligible factor in the evening’s entertainment. There was no embarrass- ment about how to conduct himself with him. Nice people, these were, glowed Jim. Real folks. Daphne took him to the door and made an engagement to go horseback riding the next afternoon if Jim could get free from duty, and “ daddy” would see to that, Daphne had promised. What would the other fellows say—out riding with the colonel’s daughter! Some style, eh? He must be careful not to be high-hat. He went up to his allotted two rooms in fine feather, scarcely noticing the atrocious curtains deserted by the previous occupant. Cretonne, they were, with purplish brown “blue” jays perched on magenta-hued branches against a gaudy yellow back- ground. They had been put there by a young officer who, through some perverted idea, had thought to make these barracks a real home. He had picked out the material himself, hired the wife of the colored janitor to stitch it up for him, had spent two Sunday afternoons putting the curtains up, had made tiers of shelves in the corner for his books and had even bought some varnish for the floors, after a vain pleading with the quartermaster for shellac, gratis. Three days after establishing himself in his “real home,” the unfortunate young officer had been ordered to the Philippines, and Jim fell heir to his arty efforts. Jim sighed, undressed as quickly as pos- sible, and relegated the pernicious curtains to darkness, finally falling asleep to dream of the well ordered home and tasty dinner of his colonel. That the daughter did not appear in Jim’s dream is interesting but not important. {f. THE next day Jim went riding with the colonel’s daughter, as per appointment, and that evening he had dinner again with the colonel. The colonel continued to be very affable, if a little remote, and his wife and Daphne were charming, intensely so. 937 They fussed over him in much the same way that Jim’s own mother and sisters had always fussed, and Jim Pickering enjoyed it. It became quite the accepted thing for Jim to dine now and then at the colonel’s, to be frequently asked to drop in at the colonel’s for a bit of afternoon tea, to have Mrs. Blodgett pour the tea at exactly the right strength and to have Daphne sweeten it for him. It was all so cozy and nice, and so much like home, that Jim scarcely troubled to think much about it. If he had, he might have discovered that he was becom- ing very much indebted to the colonel’s hospitality. Daphne took Jim to all the hops in her car. She danced with him a great deal, and let him hold her compact and handkerchief when she danced with other men, which was becoming rarer. In fact, Daphne was beginning not to care whether she danced at all, much pre- ferring a secluded nook on the Polo Club’s porch with Jim at her side and a moon in the heavens. And if Jim somehow failed to respond to her veiled hints for romance, it was not his fault. It may have been the aftereffects of the colonel’s heavy dinners, or it may have been that romance simply was not in Jim. But in Daphne’s blue eyes he noticed a new, glittering hardness—a feverish look of eternal seeking. Or perhaps it wasn’t new. It may have been there from the first. Daphne was always so eager, so intense. She would have her way. Once, as Jim was washing up after a hard day’s drill, he was startled by the insistent hoot of a horn beneath his win- dow. It was Daphne in her buff road- ster. The horn shrieked again, and was an- swered by a burst of guffaws from the room across the hall. Red and some of the other bachelor officers had noticed the fair lady’s serenading. | What could he do? He couldn’t run down dressed as he was, and he couldn’t call out to her. Women weren’t supposed to hang Gomichbooks (E(0)