Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/132

120 me own contracts. I can look after me own daughter." He checked himself on the sound of her voice in the hallway. "Don't you be puttin' notions into 'er 'ead now," he said hoarsely, "or by—"

"That 's all right," Burls smiled. "Think it over."

The door opened before her—and Sutley. "'Ello!" she said gaily. "'Ere 's 'En come to have dinner with us."

Sutley came in, very red and guilty. And Burls, looking over his shoulder in surprise, caught his partner's expression and turned in his chair, drawn around by the expectation of he did not know what.

Milly added, as she took off her hat: "'E 'as something to tell you."

Yost said: "Somethin' to w'at?"

Sutley shifted his feet heavily, and then looked down at them as if he had expected to find them the false ones that he wore on the stage. "You see," he began inconsequentially, "Milly an' me did n't want to go back to the circus. She don't like it there any more 'n I do—an' I never cut much ice 'n under canvas. I c'n make more money where I am. They 'll give us a contrac'—Burls an' me—fer a hunderd an' fifty apiece fer three years to stay on where we are."

"W'at the bl's that got to do with me?" Yost demanded.

"Well, you see, Milly an' me, we did n't want to go back, an' Milly said she 'd stan' by me. An'—"

"You 're at it, too, are you?" He swallowed wrathily. "You can get out o' 'ere an' mind yer own affairs.