Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/232

 even ask for protection. This is a big case we're on, and in a case like this we sometimes have to use queer agents."

Sadie swung about on him.

"Am I so queer?" she promptly demanded.

"I'm trying to save you from getting that way. You're far too fine a girl, Sadie, to let a chance like this ever slip away from you." "I don't see that it's gettin' me anywhere in partic'lar."

"But it isn't ended yet."

"And don't look like it ever will end."

Kestner could afford to smile at her petulance.

"You must remember," he explained with the utmost patience, "that it took Wilkie just fourteen months to run down that famous one-hundred-dollar Monroe-head silver certificate. And we're running down something infinitely more important than a piece of counterfeit paper."

"Oh, I ain't kickin' against helpin' to round up Keudell. No decent Amurican wants a foreign agent like that nosin' out our Navy secrets. And I guess I hate him as much as yuh do. What's more, he's the kind o' crook yuh gotta get, or he'll get yuh. But I ain't consoomed wit' affection for