Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/57

Rh knew that this stranger had opened my eyes to things which they had never before bothered about. I didn't explain. I couldn't explain. But in some vague way I felt sorry for Bud. He became more morose, more self-contained. Yet he was never openly unkind, or actively critical. He seemed more discontented with himself than with me. A new fever for money seemed to possess him. This prompted him to turn back to the coarser grades of work, to take chances which earlier in the game he never seemed to care to face.

Yet in some ways he tried to stay the same. He remained the same toward me, although his temper, with other people, was apt to be uncertain. It was at Ormond Beach, I remembered, that he floored a Yacht-Johnny in white ducks for making unseemly advances to me on the board-walk, knocked him as flat as a pan-cake, and at the same time put the kibosh on our hotel coup for that night, because a federal gum-shoe pushed in through the crowd and got a bead on Bud. He seemed to remember him. So we had to beat a retreat for the orange-groves before two local constables could understand why that gum-shoe was trying to commit an assault on such a respectable-looking guest as Bud.

And in Brookline, when Copperhead Kate led