Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/80

70 I turned off the avenue as sore in heart as a lost hound. I didn't want people to see my face. For this reason, I suppose, I edged in close to a crowd staring at some imported posters in Brentano's side window. Right in front of me was a white-haired old man in a gray uniform braided with black. He was a fresh-cheeked, clean-limbed, spry-looking old man, and from the bellows-wallet of well-worn pigs-skin which he carried in his hand I took him to be a bank-messenger for one of the trust companies just around the corner. Yet he seemed to be taking genuine delight in some of those newly displayed Parisian posters, for unconsciously he pushed his wallet down in his pocket and leaned closer to the plate glass for a closer inspection of a colored cover from La Rire. But I gave little further attention to that trim-figured old gentleman, for the more massive figure on my right, I suddenly discovered, was not altogether unknown to me.

It took me several minutes to place him. Then I remembered. It was Pinky McClone, the con-man, the big, blue-eyed, Irish boy who'd been the champion diver of Coethes Slip and grew up to be a lighter-thief and later worked the bathing-beaches as a life-guard and incidentally the bathers themselves as a dip and watch-lifter, with an eye out