Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/209

Rh He smoked for a moment or two, without saying a word. I had intended to return the compliment and shock him a bit. But I hadn't quite counted on leaving him with a face as long as the moral law.

"Oh, I say, this does mix things up!" he finally exclaimed, as though he were thinking out loud.

"Of course it mixes things up," I chirped back at him, shrinking back into my crook talk as a turtle shrinks back into its shell, "and especially for the ginks who are out their family jewels!"

He shook his head.

"I don't mean for them," he said. "I mean for you."

I tried to laugh, but it fell short. I was really beginning to feel a little frightened.

"I wish you hadn't done this!" Wendy Washburn said to me.

It seemed the first really sincere and direct statement that he had made to me all that night. It was as though, at a moment's notice and for a moment's time, he had dropped his mask.

"Why?" I asked him. And it flashed through me, for one wild breath or two, that this man must be In the same line of business as Bud Griswold's, with an outsider edging in on the beat that he had picketed out for himself.