Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/59

Rh light—and a cast-steel stove-lifter which could be tossed into any back yard on a moment's notice. You couldn't hold a man, he used to say, on an exhibit of kitchen utensils, though he worked a good many of his window tricks with a stone point and a suction-cap made from a glove-back.

Copperhead Kate dogged about after Bud a good deal that summer, and on a pretense that a run of hard luck had slimmed our heel we worked south from Boston to Sleepy-Town again, skipping New York as usual and striking for the high-toned colonies along the Eastern Coast. I wasn't sorry to be on the move, for I was more than ever afraid of Copperhead Kate. And I could see that Bud himself was restless. He knew that something had started me thinking things over, that I was no longer as placidly unconcerned about life as a lamb in a meadow, that I was beginning to have an inkling that the whole arrangement of things was wrong. But he worked steadily, all this time, and never lost a chance to turn the nut, as he would express it. And when winter came on we struck for Florida and floated down through the East Coast resorts, Little Me drifting ahead as the advance agent and Bud following on as the managing director. We never put up at the same hotel, of course, and we