Nothing by Chance

“Well, sweep him out, then,” Paul said, “if you’re going to be that way.”

“No!” I said. “The little guy deserves a roof over his head. How would you like somebody to sweep you out in the cold?”

“It’s not cold outside,” Paul said peevishly.

“Well, the principle of the thing. He was here before we came. This is his place more than ours.”

“All right, all right,” he said. “Leave the mouse there! Let the mouse walk all over us. But if he steps on me, I’m gonna pound him!”

Stu obediently snapped out the lights and groped back to his couch-pillows on the floor.

We talked in the dark for a while about how kind our hosts had been, and the whole town, for that matter.

“But you notice we carried no women here, or almost none?” Paul said. “There was hardly one female passenger. We had all kinds of them at Prairie.”

“We made all kinds of money, and we didn’t quite do that here,” I said.

“How’d we do in all, by the way, Stu?”

He reeled off statistics, “Seventeen passengers. Fifty-one dollars. “’Course we spent nineteen for gas. That’s what…” he paused for figuring, “… ten bucks each, today, about.”

“Not bad,” Paul said. “Ten bucks for three hours’ work. On a weekday. That works out to fifty dollars a week with all expenses paid except food, and not counting Saturday and Sunday. Hey! A guy can make a living at this!”

I wanted very much to believe him.

CHAPTER FIVE

FIRST THING NEXT MORNING, Paul Hansen was on fire. He was all crushed up in his sleeping bag, and from the end of it, from just by his hatbrim, a veil of smoke curled up.

“PAUL! YOU’RE ON FIRE!”

He didn’t move. After a short aggravated pause, he said, “I am smoking a cigarette.”

“First thing in the morning? Before you even get up? Man, I thought you were on fire!”

“Look,” he said. “Don’t bug me about my cigarettes.”

“Sorry.”

I surveyed the room, and from my low position it looked more like some neglected trash-bin than ever. In the center of the room was a cast-iron wood-burning stove. It said Warm Morning on it, in raised iron, and its draft holes looked at me with slitted eyes. The stove did not make me feel very welcome.

Lapping all around its iron feet were our supplies and equipment. On the one table were several old aviation magazines, a tool-company calendar with some very old Peter Gow-land girl-shots, Stu’s reserve parachute, with its altimeter and stopwatch strapped on. Directly beneath was my red plastic clothes bag, zippered shut, with a hole chewed about the size of a quarter in the side … THERE WAS A HOLE IN MY CLOTHES BAG! From one crisis to another.

I sprang out of bed, grabbed the bag and zipped it open. There beneath shaving kit and Levi’s and a packet of bamboo pens were my emergency rations: a box of bittersweet chocolate and several packs of cheese and crackers. One square of chocolate had been half eaten and one cheese section of a cheese-and-crackers box had been consumed. The crackers were untouched.

The mouse. That mouse from last night, under the tool-kit. My little buddy, the one whose life I saved from Hansen’s savagery. That mouse had eaten my emergency rations!

“You little devil!” I said fiercely, through gritted teeth.

“What’s the matter?” Hansen smoked his cigarette, and didn’t turn over.

“Nothing. Mouse ate my cheese.”

There was a great burst of smoke from the far couch. “THE MOUSE? That mouse from last night that I said we’d better throw outside? And you felt sorry for him? That mouse ate your food?”

“Some cheese, and a little chocolate, yeah.”

“How’d he get at it?”