Crossroads Read Online Free Page A

remembered with a cold rush of shame that she was a woman. A woman, and therefore a creature of infinite wiles. The thought held him. He studied her.
    “Well?” she asked coldly. “Are you going?”
    “D’you know,” pondered Dix Van Dyck, his grim eyes boring into hers, “I got an idea that, if I get up and leave this table, you’ll despise me. Am I right?”
    The question had the effect of a sharp jerk on the reins. The girl straightened almost with a snap and her serious frown centered steadily on him.
    Before she could answer he swept on: “Look at the way I’m fixed. All my life I’ve been hunting action. Most I could find was hounding a few yaller-hearted men. Now I get to you. Action just nacherally follers you around. I wouldn’t have to hunt for it. I find you, and you start to give me the run. I ask you, man to man…is it fair? Is it square?”
    There was a movement of her lips.
    He raised his right hand suddenly and pointed. “Right now, you got a smile all ready to pop out, and you’re fighting to keep it back. Am I right, lady?”
    She could not help it. The smile came, and then a bubbling laugh. It ran on and on through musical variations like the sound of water trickling over rocks and plunging into tinkling shallows and chiming in deep pools. In all his life Dix Van Dyck had never heard a sound that so fascinated him. He could not tell whether she was laughing with him or at him. The laughter stopped. Sitting straight in her chair, she looked at him with marvelously bright eyes, the smile coming and going at the corners of her mouth.

5
A Fight against Luck
    D o I get you right, Dix Van Dyck?” she asked. “Am I sort of a bait that pulls trouble your way? Is that why you want to hang around with me?”
    “Jack…can I call you that?”
    “Sure.”
    “Jack, you guessed right the first time. That’s why I want to hang around. Here I am, six feet two, hard as nails, handy with two guns, and nothing to do. Can you beat that?”
    “Nope,” said the girl, and broke into her musical chuckle again. “Nope, you beat the world, partner.”
    “Thanks,” grinned Dix Van Dyck. “I’ll just oil up my guns and get in fighting shape, and we’ll make a team of it.”
    She grew serious again, shaking her head. “It won’t do. I can’t let you do it. Look here, Dix Van Dyck, I like you more ’n any man I’ve run into in a long time. That’s telling you straight. I’m not going to let you go to hell because of a fool idea. If you want action, just shoot out these lights, and I’ll guarantee you all the action you want.”
    “But you see,” explained Dix Van Dyck sadly, “the trouble a man makes ain’t half so pleasin’ as the kind he just runs into sort of accidental. Understand?”
    “Yep.”
    “How long,” said Dix Van Dyck wistfully, “before things most generally starts.”
    “Mostly different a lot,” said Jacqueline.
    “In the meantime,” he said, “there’s considerable room on the floor. Do we dance?”
    She hesitated, as if she still wished to argue the question with him, as if she fought the temptation to let him stay, but then her head nodded with the rhythm of the music—she started up, and in an instant they were gliding across the floor.
    There is a strange and dangerous potency in the dance. There is no need of polished, gleaming floor, of bright lights, of a numerous and accomplished orchestra, or of a brilliant assembly of women and men. There is no need of all this. Granted an age a little under thirty, a rhythm supplied by a rusty, stringed piano, the floor of a barn or the stones of a street, and the result is the same—an intoxication, a forgetfulness of the world, two bodies moving in harmony with a thought, and that thought one of beauty. Faces tilt up—a light comes upon them—in their blood is the fragrance of spring and the richness of autumn—the pulse of life runs quicker, quicker, races—and the two strike closer to the heart of things.
    So it