Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/24

14 harder than fighting for life itself. There's always some one, when she's fighting for the latter, to throw her a life-buoy. But every buoy she gets, in the other sort of fight, comes with a line to it, a line which may look like rescue at one end but turns into something terribly like capture at the other.

No, I told myself, I couldn't go back! There were certain things now that would always make a difference. The rabbit-dog, I remembered, always had the advantage of the cotton-tail. It's better being the hunter than the hunted,—and it's incomparably more comfortable. It's safer having a nickel badge under your coat-lapel than a record on the police-blotter that gives you prairie-squint looking for Central Office "singed cats." I'd even grown to like the rabbit-dog side of the business, with all the machinery of Big Ben Locke's offices to back me up when it came to a tangled trail and all the majesty of the law of the commonwealth to interpose an arm when it came to a tight corner. But I'd lost my position! That dolorous fact kept tolling at the back of my head, the same as the bells of Trinity toll above the noonday tumult of Wall Street. And I'd never been the sort of girl that had new positions forever whimpering at her heels. The only other offer I'd had was from the