Just what had become of my sense of humor that night I have never been able to decide. Certainly it was not with me. Instead of howling with laughter my brain felt as an egg looks when it is being prepared for scrambling.
“Did Joe Ellen know him in Texas?” I asked, still feebly keeping to the details of the affair.
“Exactly three days to the hour—that’s the reason they were married at eleven o’clock at night—exactly three days to the minute that they first met each other. Romance! Only a genius with Joe Ellen’s colossal brain could have thought out such a perfect climax. You won’t mind if I take your other pillow, will you, dear?”
“Oh, no, certainly not,” I assured her, as I hastily extracted one of the two minute pillows from behind my back and handed it to her. As she settled herself, her head at the foot of my bed and her feet in the comfortably warm spot on which my shoulders had rested previous to her bursting into my room, I meekly inquired: “Anybody in your room?”
“My burglar,” she answered in the matter-of-fact tone of one agreeing that two and two make four. “I hadn’t thought of bringing him in until he noticed that the policeman making his rounds looked at us. He got an idea that the officer was coming back and tell us to move on just to get a good look at him. He’s awfully psychic about policemen—says all men who have served three terms in Sing Sing are. Of course, if it had been the regular park policeman”—here she yawned and moved her feet nearer my corner of refuge—“it would have been all right. I’ve helped him take drunken women to Jefferson Market jail so often that we’ve got to be real pals.”
She had hardly finished this last sentence when she began to snore, her buttonhole mouth wide open and her nose startlingly like the beak of a parrot. Convinced that I would never be able to get back to sleep with such a noise so near, I slipped out of bed and proceeded to get my breakfast with a tiny alcohol-lamp.
That was in the midst of one of the severest blizzards ever experienced in New York City. It was impossible to get coal, and gas-pipes all over town had frozen and burst. In spite of the warmth of my heavy blanket bath-robe I was chilled to the bone.
I was sitting on my feet and eating my breakfast—a cup of hot tea without milk or sugar, and war bread with margarine—when I heard a plank in the hall outside my door groan. The burglar! Creeping noiselessly to the door I listened. Some creature was trying to pass without detection across the carpeted floor of the square hall. A second plank groaned.