uld. He glanced at the Angel. NOW would she see?

"On my soul!" he muttered under his breath. "They don't aven touch her!"

She laid down her sunshade and gloves. She walked to the end of the
counter and turned the full battery of her eyes on the attendant.

"Please," she said.

The white-aproned individual stepped back and gave delighted assent. The
Angel stepped beside him, and selecting a tall, flaring glass, of almost
paper thinness, she stooped and rolled it in a tray of cracked ice.

"I want to mix a drink for my friend," she said. "He has a long, hot
ride before him, and I don't want him started off with one of those old
palate-teasing sweetnesses that you mix just on purpose to drive a man
back in ten minutes." There was an appreciative laugh from the line at
the counter.

"I want a clear, cool, sparkling drink that has a tang of acid in it.
Where's the cherry phosphate? That, not at all sweet, would be good;
don't you think?"

The attendant did think. He pointed out the different taps, and the
Angel compounded the drink, while Freckles, standing so erect he almost
leaned backward, gazed at her and paid no attention to anyone else. When
she had the glass brimming, she tilted a little of its contents into a
second glass and tasted it.

"That's entirely too sweet for a thirsty man," she said.

She poured out half the mixture, and refilling the glass, tasted it a
second time. She submitted that result to the attendant. "Isn't that
about the thing?" she asked.

He replied enthusiastically. "I'd get my wages raised ten a month if I
could learn that trick."

The Angel carried the brimming, frosty glass to Freckles. He removed his
hat, and lifting the icy liquid even with her eyes and looking straight
into them, he said in the mellowest of all the mellow tones of his
voice: "I'll be drinking it to the Swamp Angel."

As he had said to her that first day, she now cautioned him: "Be
drinking slowly."

When the screen-door swung behind them, one of the men at the counter
asked of the attendant: "Now, what did that mean?"

"Exactly what you saw," replied he, rather curtly. "We're accustomed
to it here. Hardly a day passes, this hot weather, but she's picking
up some poor, god-forsaken mortal and bringing him in. Then she comes
behind the counter herself and fixes up a drink to suit the occasion.
She's all sorts of fancies about what's what for all kinds of times and
conditions, and you bet she can just hit