"Married!--and I don't so much as know her name!" gritted Ford, and went
over and laid himself down upon the bed, and sulked for the rest of that
day of rain and gloom.




CHAPTER II

Wanted: Information


Sulking never yet solved a mystery nor will it accomplish much toward
bettering an unpleasant situation. After a day of unmitigated gloom and
a night of uneasy dreams, Ford awoke to a white, shifting world of the
season's first blizzard, and to something like his normal outlook upon
life.

That outlook had ever been cheerful, with the cheerfulness which comes
of taking life in twenty-four-hour doses only, and of looking not too
far ahead and backward not at all. Plenty of persons live after that
fashion and thereby attain middle life with smooth foreheads and cheeks
unlined by thought; and Ford was therefore not much different from his
fellows. Never before had he found himself with anything worse than
bodily bruises to sour life for him after a tumultuous night or two in
town, and the sensation of a discomfort which had not sprung from some
well-defined physical sense was therefore sufficiently novel to claim
all his attention.