He wanted Marie. He wanted her more than he had ever wanted her in
the old days, with a tenderness, an impulse to shield her from her own
weaknesses, her own mistakes. Then--in those old days--there had been
the glamor of mystery that is called romance. That was gone, worn away
by the close intimacies of matrimony. He knew her faults, he knew how
she looked when she was angry and petulant. He knew how little the real
Marie resembled the speciously amiable, altogether attractive Marie who
faced a smiling world when she went pleasuring. He knew, but--he wanted
her just the same. He wanted to tell her so many things about the
burros, and about the desert--things that would make her laugh, and
things that would make her blink back the tears. He was homesick for her
as he had never been homesick in his life before. The picture flickered
on through scene after scene that Bud did not see at all, though he was
staring unwinkingly at the screen all the while. The love scenes at the
last were poignantly real, but they passed before his eyes unnoticed.
Bud's mind was dwelling upon certain love scenes of his own. He was
feeling Marie's presence beside him there in the dusk.
"Poor kid--she wasn't so much to blame," he muttered just above his
breath, when the screen was swept clean and blank at the end of the last
reel.
"Huh? Oh, he was the big mutt, right from the start," Frank replied
with the assured air of a connoisseur. "He didn't have the brains of a
bluejay, or he'd have known all the time she was strong for him."
"I guess that's right," Bud mumbled, but he did not mean what Frank
thought he meant. "Let's go. I want a drink."
Frank was willing enough; too willing, if the truth were known. They
went out into the cool starlight, and hurried across the side street
that was no more than a dusty roadway, to the saloon where they had
spent the afternoon. Bud called for whisky, and helped himself twice
from the bottle which the bartender placed between them. He did not
speak until the second glass was emptied, and then he turned to Frank
with a purple glare in his eyes.
"Let's have a game of pool or something," he suggested.
"There's a good poker game going, back there," vouchsafed the bartender,
turning his thumb toward the rear, where half a dozen men were gathered
in a close group around a table. "There's some real money in sight,
to-night."
"All right, let's go see." Bud turned that way, Frank following like a
pet dog at his heels.
At dawn the next morning, Bud got up stiffly from the chair where he
had spent the night. His eyeballs showed a network of tiny red veins,
swollen with the surge of alcohol in his blood and with the strain of
staring all night at the cards. Beneath his eyes were puffy ridges. His
cheekbones flamed with the whisky flush. He cashed in a double-handful
of chips, stuffed the money he had won into his coat pocket, walked,
with that stiff precision of gait by which a drunken man strives to
hide his drunkenness, to the bar and had another drink. Frank was at his
elbow. Frank was staggering, garrulous, laughing a great deal over very
small jokes.