Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/136

 floor and long oak bar behind the screen and, in back, a fair-sized, liquor-and-tobacco-reeking room with six round tables and a couple of small, one-table private rooms opening off it. "Kilkerry's" was the name in raised, partly peeled gilt letters on the board over the door from which the draft beer advertisement and the formal "Ale and Porter" plate had been torn in deference to the eighteenth amendment; but everybody knew what Kilkerry's served. It was only for decency's sake that he let his name peel and his clapboards blister; when clearing four times the profit on bad whiskey and gin you ever rung up on good, only the foolish man would forget to look as though he were sunk to ruin on sarsaparillas and vichy waters.

Across those cigar-scorched, dented tabletops Russell had made his original boasts to his companions that he would get satisfaction or Hale; and the patrons of Kilkerry's, having read in the newspapers of the sudden illness of the general manager of Tri-Lake Products and Material Corporation on the same night that Russell disappeared, put two and two together, audibly and often; and openly they announced the answer.

"Sick!" puffed one Simmons, from a chair where, he said, Russell had sat when he, Simmons, occupied the seat Gregg was in. "I bet that bird took sick sudden! The  . What's matter wi' Russell, damn fool? Doesn't he want to collect? Struck oil somewhere, has he? Maybe Uncle Bim died and he don't need no money. Not a peep in the papers, d'you see that? Hale's sick; that's all they dare tell. Say, can Georgie Russell collect?"

So Simmons expected Russell back; all the regulars at Kilkerry's expected him; for there he had boasted;