A few minutes later Steve heard a disturbance in the hallway.
Lute and Ted were standing at the head of the staircase grinning curiously at Tom who was stomping up to the lounge. He brushed past them and made a beeline for his room, shaking his head and muttering, “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, so help me, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle….”
Lute and Ted looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders, and sat down to wait for Tom to come out. In a few minutes he emerged from his room, still in a state of shock, and stumbled into the lounge, groping for a place to sit down. Lute shoved a chair under him and waited impatiently for his big friend to say something.
“I guess the bet’s off.”
Tom was too dead serious for Lute to crack a joke, so he waited for him to open up some more.
“I walk up to the reception desk as usual and ask for Cecilia Endsrud. The receptionist says she’s on the phone so I’ll have to wait a minute. I sit down. After a few minutes she comes in beaming like a full moon on an August night. We talk for a minute or two and then I ask her to the concert. She thanks me and says all bashful-like that someone has just asked her and she has said yes. I guess I just blurted out, ‘Who?’ without thinking. She says, ‘Your friend, Steve Pearson.’ I reckon my jaw must have dropped a good six inches. I was speechless. She stood there fidgeting, pretty as a picture. God, she never looked so beautiful. All I said was, ‘Well, have a good time.’ Then I excused myself and walked on out of there.”
The big fellow dropped his chin into his hands and stared blankly at the wall. Then, like Caesar crying out, “Et tu, Brute!” he moaned, “Steve!… Buddy!… Steve!…”
Lute and Ted were as shocked as Tom was. There was dead silence.
“Well,” Ted said at length in his slow drawl, “I reckon finally Steve has really done something.”
Two heads nodded up and down. Even Tom had to concede that at long last Steve had “really done something.”