Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/243

Rh family and found him guilty of a family weakness which he thought he despised. He asked, to ignore her: "Buried the hatchet, Pop?"

The old man sat down with a sniff. "I have not! He can't buy me off with two slugs o' B'urbon. The fat toad!"

Barney saw the disgust that deepened in the girl's expression. She summed up her opinion of all the Maloneys in the contemptuous look that she gave him as she rose. She did not speak. She did not need to.

He watched her until she disappeared among the excursionists on the farther side of the barge. He said: "There 's the makin's of a swell batch of trouble, gone sour!"

The father muttered, over one of the Honorable Mike's cigars: "Sheeny Mike! Huh! It 's good enough fer 'm!" And Barney, seeing himself in the same attitude of futilely defying the absent, felt the truth of her criticism of him rankling in his wounded self-respect. A family of hot-air Harps! And he the worst of them, since he had not even Tim's loyalty to his kind.

The thought made him meek. "Well," he said, "she 's well out of it, I guess. Where 's Tim? Back at the bar? Come an' have a drink with us. Pop. It 's on me."

If Fanny Menchenoff thought, then, that she had forever done with the Maloneys, it was because she did