The Man the Tiger And the Snake

e passed the Clinton Loan and Trust Company he heard his name called. From a touring car standing by the curb in front of the bank a woman was waving to him. He went quickly to her, hat doffed, hand outstretched; with that queer heady tenderness with which the presence of Marcia Nolan always filled him. Not even after seven years could he quite reconcile himself to the fact that she was Marcia Lynn. "So it has come to this, Cooper?street meetings!" she exclaimed, her eyes alive with pleasure. '' Marcia! My, but I'm glad to see you!" he said. It was fine when he was standing talking to her; but it was like taking a cold plunge in icy weather to get to that point. "Glad? Tut-tut, forswear not thy soul!" she laughed. "No good-bye when you departed; no little hello in the times you came back, and just one stingy card from Texas or one of those melodramatic states?just one stingy card, most reverend signor! Why, for all I knew Cooper Comlough might have become a citizen of Patagonia. Tell me, Cooper, are you a citizen of Patagonia now?" Usually self-possessed, almost grave, for the last several years Marcia greeted him with these half-reproachful railleries. It made it much easier for him, being a man who had had not a few occasions to find refuge in humor when he thought of her. But something in her manner at times puzzled him. "You know what corking friends the pen and I are," he answered now. "You're right, though, I am part ruffian for not hav...