Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/111

Rh from his lips, his jaws set. He stopped dead in his tracks, his hand slowly going back to his side.

"So," he said after a brief silence in which Beatrice looked curiously from him to Joe Embry upon whose expressionless face Steele's eyes rested, "I find you again, do I, Joe Embry?"

Startled wonderment surged into Beatrice's heart, wonderment that that voice could be the voice of "that man" Steele. The boyish heartiness had flown from it, leaving it harder, colder, more implacable than she had ever known a man's tone could be. It was not raised in anger; rather was it hushed, so quiet that the words barely came to her attentive ears. And yet, unprepared for just this, she shivered at it and at what she read in his face. And now in Joe Embry's eyes, eyes which so seldom gossiped of what lay in Joe Embry's thought, she read the answer to Steele's look. It was but a flash that came and went with lightning swiftness, and yet in that vital instant it illuminated as brightly as lightning itself illumines the dark heavens, the thing that lay in Joe Embry's soul. Again Beatrice shivered; though she had never seen it before, she recognized it instinctively. It was ugly, naked hatred.

"When two men hate as those two hate!" she thought fearfully.

The instant had come, cast its sinister radiance and gone, with not so much as a hand raised or clenched. The old inscrutability was back in Joe Embry's eyes, the shades were down over the windows of his soul, his rejoinder to Steele's words came quietly.