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asbestos turned red in the heat.
    “Don’t go to sleep with it burning and all the doors and windows closed,” he said. “It’ll suffocate you.”
    “All right,” I said. I put the bags down.
    He paused on his way out, with his hand on the door. “Salesman, I guess, huh?”
    “No,” I said. “I don’t sell anything.”
    “Oh.” He went out.
    I sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette. The gas heater burned with a slight hiss, and outside I could hear the wind searching restlessly around the cabins. I tried to think about it. It had gone all right. In less than a week the whole town would be as curious as he was right now. Why would a man—and an obvious Easterner, at that—come to a whistle stop like this in the middle of nowhere, take a cabin by the month, and just stay here, doing nothing at all? And if they thought that was odd, they would have their hands full when they began to get the rest of the act.
    Then I wasn’t thinking about it. I was thinking about her. I could see her. I could almost feel her there in the cabin. The hell, I thought; it wasn’t this bad before, when we split up. I’d missed her, but not like this. It was just the bleak loneliness of this God-forsaken outpost at the end of nowhere. That had to be it. Before, there had been the gambling, and big cities, and other girls, and always the horses running. Sure, that was all it was, just the loneliness.
    I could see I didn’t want much of this—this sitting around here thinking how it had been in San Antonio and listening to the wind. I wondered how long it would take. A month? But we couldn’t rush it. That would be fatal. He had to come to me. All I could do was set out the bait and wait for him. But she was going to drive up Saturday night, a week from tomorrow. It was only eight days.
    I went into the cold bathroom and shaved. I looked strange with the crew haircut and the steel-rimmed glasses. Dr. Julius Reichert, I thought, the dedicated chemist who doesn’t know a compound from a mixture. We were taking long chances. Would Goodwin go for it?
    After I changed clothes I walked back to town and sat around the drugstore, reading magazines. Around six I picked out the most likely-looking of the town’s three restaurants and ate dinner—pork chops and applesauce—thinking of the bisque d’ecrevisses at Antoine’s. Since it was Friday night, the movie was a Western. I walked back to Frankie and Johnnie’s in the windy dark and thought of Sunday and shuddered.
    The bank was open a half day Saturday, but I didn’t go near it. I’d do that Monday. I read the rest of the magazines and listened to the coveys of jail bait chatter around the drugstore. The waitresses in the restaurant were beginning to recognize me. I didn’t talk to them except to agree to whatever they said about the weather.
    I awoke at dawn on Sunday, and could hear the coyotes somewhere out on the prairie. It was funny, I thought, remembering, how only two or three could sound like thirty. After I’d eaten breakfast I put on the boots I’d bought, dressed in khaki trousers and a flannel shirt, and went for a long walk, taking a couple of the little cardboard boxes in my coat pocket. A half mile east of town I left the highway where the dunes began and went out across country, skirting the edge of the sand. It was clear, with a cold wind blowing and making a lonely sound in the telephone lines. I thought of what Charlie had said. He hoped I didn’t go mad.
    There was no danger of getting lost, with the highway always to the north and the haze-blue shadows of the mountains far off in Mexico as a landmark to the south. The highway was out of sight, but I could still see the telephone lines after I’d gone a mile. I sat down in the sun on the south side of a dune, out of the wind, and smoked a cigarette. It was lonely and wild and desolate, but it was better than the cabin or the town.
    Before I went back I filled the two boxes with sand and stowed them in my