Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/313

 she does, there'll always be some guy or other t' give her a yank back to the ol' groove. They jus' won't give her a chance."

"I know all that," quickly acknowledged her impatient companion. "What I want to find out is where she is—now—at this moment!"

"Hold your horses a minute! I'm comin' to that. Maura never was a mixer like me. An' she had more'n lonesomeness to fight against when, I happened along. A girl like that's gotta have money. She's gotta have it to pertect herself. She's gotta go to good hotels, an' keep to the better quarters, an' stick a buffer out b'tween her an' the riff-raff. An' how's she goin' to do that when she's gotta skimp an' save jus' to keep things goin'? And when she won't even push a bit o' phoney paper when the cash runs low?"

"Of course she'd never do that," agreed Kestner. The pert and sophisticated young face across the table from him smiled for a moment. But her manner grew serious as she hurried on with her talk.

"An' when she shook herself free that time in New York she said she was goin' to keep within the law. Y' know that as well as I do. Lambert was gone; Morello was wiped out. The whole gang was done for. It looked like the chance of a lifetime. An' I guess it would 've been—only something reached out an' rattled the skeleton in the fam'ly closet. No; it wasn't a skeleton; it was a whole boneyard!"

"Make that plainer," commanded Kestner.

"I mean that when Maura got to Paris this las' time she was spotted by a guy called Watchel."

"Watchel?" repeated Kestner. He could not, at