Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/246

 "Still sunnin' hisself out in front," solemnly announced her servitor.

"I wantta see him."

"Sure!" assented the bartender, as he swept Sadie's spurned change into his huge palm and went whistling from the heavy-aired room with its residuary taint of many beverages.

Two minutes later a portly figure wearing a diamond shirt-stud and pink-striped collar and cuffs stepped back into the empty "parlor." From one corner of his mouth drooped a dark-colored cigar. "Howdy, Sadie!" he said, without removing the cigar. He stared down at her with open and half-derisive approbation. "Hully gee, but they've got yous queened up like a Coney Island float!"

"Tim, where's Shindler?" demanded the woman at the table, altogether ignoring the other's gallantry.

The man called Tim smoked meditatively for a moment or two: it was plain that he nursed a latent respect for Sadie Wimpel.

"That's one on me, little one," he confessed. "If yuh want to find Shindler yuh'd better dig up Coke Kilvert. I seen him and Coke drinkin' Chianti over to Peruchetti's some time early last week."

"And not since then?"