store, a place that specialized in sporting goods. There were cases of fishing reels, brilliant tied flies and varnished, gayly wrapped cane rods, gaffs and coiled wire leaders, and an impressive assortment of modern pistols, rifles and shotguns.
"Something small and neat," Doret told the man in charge of the weapons.
He examined a compact automatic pistol, a blunted shape no larger than his palm. It was a beautiful mechanism, and as with his silken razors, merely to hold it, to test the smooth action, gave him a sense of pleasure.
Later, seated in a quiet café, an adjunct of the saloon below, he could not resist the temptation of taking the pistol in its rubber holster from his pocket, merely to finger the delicate trigger. There was no hurry. He knew his world thoroughly: it was a small land in which the inhabitants had constant knowledge of each other. A question in the right place would bring all the information he needed. Lemuel was absolutely composed, actually he was a little sleepy; longing and inner strife, dreams, were at an end; only an old familiar state, a thoroughly comprehensible purpose remained.
A girl—she could have been no more than fourteen—was hurriedly slipping a paper of white crystalline powder into a glass of sarsaparilla. She smiled at him as she saw his indifferent interrogation.
"It's better rolled with a pencil first," he said, and then returned to the contemplation of his own affair.
The result of this was that, soon after, he was seated in the smoking car of an electric train that, hurtling across a sedgy green expanse of salt meadow, deposited him in a
