Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/303

 It was Wallaby Sam who spoke next. His voice was shaking a little, and for the first time in his life he seemed to have parted from his rubicund suavity. He was like a robin with a house-cat too close to its fledglings.

"Look here, my girl, we're not here for the fun of all this. You know who we are, don't you?" Sadie continued to eye them with languid scorn. "I know the whole bunch!"

"And do you imagine we're going to put up with much of this monkey-work?"

"I ain't interested in what yuh're goin' to put up with!"

"But you're here, and you're going to stay here until you answer certain questions."

"And then what?" inquired Sadie.

It was Keudell who spoke next. "You do not intend to talk, perhaps?" he demanded.

"Ain't I talkin'?" inquired Sadie.

Keudell leaned forward across the green-baize table-top, staring at her. For a moment he stared at her almost abstractedly, as though pondering the mystery of human speech and the inviolability of the human will. He stood arrested by the consciousness that behind the unfurrowed frontal-bone