It might be two or three days
before Downs turned up again, if indeed he turned up at all, but
Blakely was here and could be held. Hence the "horse order" of the
earlier evening.
It was nearly two when Blakely reached his quarters, rebuffed and
stung. He was so nervous, however, that, in spite of serious fatigue,
he found it for over an hour impossible to sleep. He turned out his
light and lay in the dark, and the atmosphere of the room seemed
heavily charged with rank tobacco. His new "striker" had sat up, it
seems, keeping faithful vigil against his master's return, but, as the
hours wore on, had solaced himself with pipe after pipe, and wandering
about to keep awake. Most of the time, he declared, he had spent in a
big rocking chair on the porch at the side door, but the scent of the
weed and of that veteran pipe permeated the entire premises, and the
Bugologist hated dead tobacco. He got up and tore down the blanket
screen at the side windows and opened all the doors wide and tried his
couch again, and still he wooed the drowsy god in vain. "Nor poppy nor
mandragora" had he to soothe him. Instead there were new and anxious
thoughts to vex, and so another half hour he tossed and tumbled, and
when at last he seemed dropping to the borderland, perhaps, of dreams,
he thought he must be ailing again and in need of new bandages or
cooling drink or something, for the muffled footfalls, betrayed by
creaking pine rather than by other sound, told him drowsily that the
attendant or somebody, cautioned not to disturb him, was moving
slowly across the room.
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