the night before the wedding, though personally I never held it against him for it was purely and simply an accident, and we were all shellacked at the time. Besides, he no more meant to black my eye, I'm sure, than I intended to tear his ear, which after all, did no great harm except that it didn't improve his looks any, and he was going to be the best man. But then, come to think of it, his looks weren't anything to write home about to begin with.
I tried to point this out to Connie afterward.
"Keep still, Pete Bartlett!" she said. "I was never so mortified in all my life as I was this morning when I came moseying up the aisle and saw you standing in the chancel. What a sight for the eyes of a blushing bride! Tsk, tsk!" At the memory, her brows swooped toward the bridge of her nose. "That drunken bum, Bill Hastings!"
"But, honey. I hit him first."
"That's it! Stick up for him!"
Ah, well. What was the use?
"Let's not fight on the first day of our honeymoon, baby," I said tenderly.
We'd been married at ten o'clock that morning, left the reception at two, and now two hours later we were both lying on the warm sands of deserted Alamosa Beach, basking in the late afternoon sun. It had been a popular vacation spot in its day, but that day was long since past. Except for Bill's cottage where we were staying, the few other shacks high on the dunes behind us were deserted. There were still a few guests, we had been told, in the rickety old hotel at the far end of the beach. But that was around a bend in the shore, and the hotel and its guests were out of our sight and we were out of theirs.
This made it convenient whenever I felt like kissing Connie, which I'm bound to say was often. For she detests love-making in public.
But now, in the intervals between kisses, we were lying flat on our backs, with Connie at right angles to me, her bright-penny held resting none too comfortably on my stomach. We were talking of this and that, and she was letting the sands drift idly through her hands. First she'd plunge them in, palms down, and then she'd turn them, bringing up palmsful of the golden grains only to let them spill in drifts through her slightly spread fingers.
And that was how she found the bottle.
Her fingers encountered something hard, and she burrowed deeper into the sand, dredging up at last a bottle. It was of amethyst glass with little air-bubbles embedded in the crystal. But though the air-bubbles showed up plainly when you held the bottle up against the light, it wasn't possible to see into it. It bore no label, and it was very tightly corked.
"Dear me," Connie said thoughtfully, holding the thing aloft. "The Morton luck."
"You're a Bartlett now," I reminded her fondly.
"Why, so I am. But my luck still holds."
"You mean it's got Scotch in it?"
"Try to climb onto a spiritual plane, dear, for once in your life," Connie said. "Scotch, indeed! No. But there'll be a djinn in it, of course, who'll have to grant me whatever I wish for. Wait and see. I've always been lucky, haven't I? Remember the time I found the purse with seventy-nine cents in it on the park bench? And the night I found the woman's slipper in the Bijou Theater? And—"
"—this morning, when you got me up to the altar?"
"Which I'll live to regret, no doubt," Connie smiled. "Well, anyway. A djinn. Think of it, dear."
I didn't think much of it.
"Suppose you pull the cork out?" I yawned. "And then we can both relax again."
"I've married a man with no imagination whatever," complained Connie to the sad sea waves.
But she proceeded to withdraw the cork as I'd told her, and so help me, there really was something in the bottle. I felt a peculiar sensation that wasn't entirely pleasant in the small of my back and all along the channel of my spine as I watched a thin trickle of gray vapor emerge from the bottle, and slowly begin to rise above it.
The thick mist rose higher still till it was
