Page:Keeban (IA keeban00balm).pdf/154

 over his job just as he schemed it. Nobody could beat that boy; if they tried to, the sod for them.

It looked like madness for them to be here tonight; but madness marks the big job.

Here was Keeban, Harry Vine. He had boasted that he would bring his woman, whom some thought had gone away from him. Surely he had arranged his get-away with her; but before he used it, here he was proving that she was his.

But she wasn't his! At least, so Jerry had told me. She'd come with him, but she was, in fact, no longer his. Something more was on tonight than that rapiered and daggered Raleigh expected. I danced with Cleopatra, watching them dance, and also I looked now for the reappearance of the other Raleigh, who was Jerry.

The number ended; now clapping; now encore. My arms circled Cleopatra; I clasped her. Keeban clasped Christina.

As I watched his arm go around her, so exactly as Jerry's clasped his partner in the dance, I got another jerk. Maybe he was Jerry! Maybe what was to happen between Jerry and his "friend", his brother, had happened outside. I