Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/359

 "You sure you ought to come?" Ellison challenged him, before starting. "You don't look so awfully steady."

Calvin was not; he quivered with an uncontrollable dread that Ellison had learned something to refute the account in the paper and would mention it; but when Calvin insisted he was steady, Ellison merely said: "We may be mighty busy or maybe nothing for anybody to do to-day. Some are saying they're going to shoot it out at the graveyard; some say they're all calling quits to-day."

"They," as Calvin well knew, were the gang factions of the late Considine and of the late Baretta. "Of course Zenn knows who got Baretta," chatted Ellison. "But he chalks it against the Considine bunch, figuring Baretta wouldn't have been got if they hadn't squealed. . . . By the way, our friend Ketlar didn't lose much time, did he?"

"No," said Calvin, reasonlessly quivering. "I see he married Lola Nesson at Waukegan."

"Hm," nodded Ellison, without denying it. "And she wasn't even along—was she?—when he drove off after court?"

At half a mile from Baretta's house the traffic was congested, and the newspaper prophecy proved no adequate forecast of the spectacle of the street. Ellison parked his car far from the focal square and Calvin and he proceeded on foot, escorted by police, to a point from which they could observe not only the multitude in the street and in the surrounding windows and upon the roofs, but whence they had view of the endless lines of favored individuals filing in and out of the house.

They could see, in the front windows of Baretta's home and in the house next door, which was requisitioned for display of the overflow of flowers, the heaped-up wreaths and sprays of rose, red, pink, yellow and white;