passed over his head and he walked now in comparative darkness where the sea-wall made its right angle with the boulevard. The wind did not reach here and since he could sit on the edge of the tarpaulin and fold it about him, knees and all, soon his body heated it inside like a tent. Now he did not have to watch the beacon sweep in from across the lake in its full arc except when the beam materialized slicing across the pie-shaped quarter of sky framed by the right angle of wall and ramp. It was the warmth; all of a sudden he had been telling Shumann for some time that she did not understand. And he knew that that was not right; all the while that he was telling Shumann he was also telling himself that that was not right. His cramped chin came up from the bony peaks of his knees; his feet were cold too or were probably cold because at first he did not feel them at all until they filled suddenly with the cold needles.
Now (the searchlight on the shore was black and only the one on the dredge stared as before downward into the water) the police-boat lay to and there was not one of the small boats in sight and he saw that most of the cars were gone too from the ramp overhead even while he was thinking that it could not possibly have been that long. But it had; the steady clock-like sweep flick! sweep, sweep flick! sweep of the beacon had accomplished something apparently, it had checked something off; as he looked upward the dark sea-wall overhead came into abrupt sharp relief and then simultaneous with the recognition of the glow as floodlights he heard the displacing of air and then saw the navigation lights of the transport as it slid, quite low, across the black angle and on to the field. “That means it’s after four o’clock,” he thought. “That means it’s to-morrow.” It was not dawn yet though; before that he was trying to draw himself back as though by the arm while he was saying again to Shumann, “You see, it looks like I have just got to try to explain to somebody that she—” and jerked himself upward (he had not even leaned his head down to his knees this time and so had nowhere to jerk back to), the needles not needles now but actual ice and his mouth open as though it were not large enough to accommodate the air which his lungs required or the lungs not large enough to accommodate the air which his body had to have, and the long arm of the beacon sweeping athwart his gaze with a motion peremptory, ruthless and unhurried and already fading; it was some time even yet before he realized that it was not the beacon fading but the brightening sky.
The sun had risen before the diver went down and came up, and most of the cars were back by then too, ranked into the ubiquitous blue-and-drab rampart. The reporter had returned the tarpaulin; relieved of its stiff and chafing weight he now shook steadily in the pink chill of the first morning of the entire four days to be ushered in by no overcast. But he did not see her again at all. There was a somewhat larger crowd than there had been the evening before (it was Sunday, and there were now two police-launches and the number of skiffs and dories had trebled as though the first lot had spawned somewhere during the night) yet he had daylight to assist him now. But he did not see her. He saw Jiggs from a distance several times, but he did not see her; he did not even know that she had been to the beach again until after the diver came up and reported and he (the reporter) was climbing back towards the boulevard and the telephone and the parachute jumper called to him. The jumper came down the beach, not from the water but from the direction of the field, jerking savagely after him the injured leg from which he had burst the dressing and the fresh scab in making his jump yesterday.
“I was looking for you,” he said. From his pocket he took a neatly folded sheaf of bills. “Roger said he owed you twenty-two dollars. Is that right?”
“Yes,” the reporter said. The jumper held the money clipped between two fingers and folded over under his thumb.
“You got time to attend to some business for us or are you going to be busy?” he said.
“Busy?” the reporter said.
“Yes. Busy. If you are, say so, so I can find somebody else to do it.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I’ll do it.”
“You sure? If not, say so. It won’t be much trouble; anybody can do it. I just thought of you because you seem to have already got yourself pretty well mixed up with us, and you will be here.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I’ll do it.”
“All right, then. We’re going to get away to-day. No use hanging around here. Those bastards out there” — he jerked his head towards the lake, the clump of boats on the rosy water— “ain’t going to get him out from under all that muck with just a handful of ropes. So we’re going. What I want to do is leave some money with you in case they do… around out there and finally get him up.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I see.” The jumper stared at him with that bleak tense quiet.
“Don’t think I like to ask this any more than you like to hear it. But maybe you never sent for us to come here, and maybe we never asked you to move in on us: you’ll have to admit that. Anyway, it’s all done now; I can’t help it any more than you can.” The jumper’s other hand came to the money; the reporter saw how the bills had already been separated carefully into two parts and that the part which the jumper extended towards him was clipped neatly with two paper clips beneath a strip of paper bearing a neatly printed address, a name which the reporter read at a glance because he had seen it before when he watched Shumann write it on the note. “Here’s seventy-five bucks, and that’s the address. I don’t know what it will cost to ship him.
But if it is enough to ship him and still pay you your twenty-two bucks, do it. And if it ain’t enough to pay you your twenty-two and still ship him, ship him and write me and I will send you the difference.” This time the slip of paper came, folded, from his pocket. “This is mine. I kept them separate so you wouldn’t get them mixed. Do you understand? Send him to the first address, the one with the money. And if there ain’t enough left to pay you your twenty-two, write to me at the second one and I will send it to you. It may take some time for the letter to catch up with me, but I will get it sooner or later and I will send you the money. Understand?”
“Yes,” the reporter said.
“All right. I asked you if you would attend to it and you said you would. But I didn’t say anything about promise. Did I?”
“I promise,” the reporter said.
“I don’t want you to promise that. What I want you to promise is another thing. Something else. Don’t think I want to ask it; I told you that; I don’t want to ask it any more than you want to hear it. What I want you to promise is, don’t send him collect.”
“I promise,” the reporter said.
“All right. Call it a gamble on your twenty-two dollars, if you want to. But not collect. The seventy-five may not be enough. But all we got now is my nineteen-fifty from yesterday and the prize-money from Thursday. That was a hundred and four. So I can’t spare more than seventy-five. You’ll have to chance it. If the seventy-five won’t ship him ho —— — to that address I gave you, you can do either of two things. You can pay the difference yourself and write me and I will send you the difference and your twenty-two. Or if you don’t want to take a chance on me, use the seventy-five to bury him here; there must be some way you can do it so they can find him later if they want to. But don’t send him collect. I am not asking you to promise to put out any money of your own to send him back; I am just asking you to promise not to leave it so they will have to pay him out of the freight or the express office. Will you?”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I promise.”
“All right,” the jumper said. He put the money into the reporter’s hand. “Thanks. I guess we will leave to-day. So I guess I will tell you good-bye.” He looked at the reporter, bleak, his face spent with sleeplessness too, standing with the injured leg propped stiffly in the shell-dust. “She took a couple of big drinks and she is asleep now.” He looked at the reporter with that bleak speculation which seemed to be almost clairvoyant. “Don’t take it too hard. You never made him try to fly that crate any more than you could have kept him from it. No man will hold that against you, and what she