Page:Arthur Stringer - The Shadow.djvu/178

 and peevishly demanded the man in the soiled white duck, as though impatient of the other's indirections.

Blake smoked for a moment or two before answering.

"I 'm looking for a man called Connie Binhart," he finally confessed, as he continued to study that ruinous figure in front of him. It startled him to see what idleness and alcohol and the heat of the tropics could do to a man once as astute as Dusty McGlade.

"Then why didn't you say so?" complained McGlade, as though impatient of obliquities that had been altogether too apparent. He had once been afraid of this man called Blake, he remembered. But time had changed things, as time has the habit of doing. And most of all, time had changed Blake himself, had left the old-time Headquarters man oddly heavy of movement and strangely slow of thought.

"Well, I 'm saying it now!" Blake's guttural voice was reminding him.

"Then why did n't you say it an hour ago?"