Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/113

 ber’s at de other end. What name you lookin’ fer?” he asked, with an assumption of confidential familiarity.

“Why?” asked Val.

The other did not meet his direct gaze. He spat again, this time on the hub of the taxi’s rear wheel, and regarded his marksmanship admiringly for a moment or two before answering.

“Oh, nothin’,” he said at length. “Just thort I might help you, dat’s all.” Val gave him a quarter, which he accepted in a dignified manner, much as a shopkeeper accepts money for merchandise. He turned and went back to lounge with his friends, paying no more attention to Val and his party.

Telling the taxi driver to wait for them there, and to be ready to start at an instant’s notice, Val and his man proceeded up the alley to number 22, Eddie carrying a suitcase in which to take away the books, if they found them. Val had his plans made, sketchily. They were simply this: To knock on the door. If Teck was in, which was not likely, they were to enter and by a show of force search his rooms. If he was not in, they were to find a way to force their entrance into the rooms. That was all. The legality of the proceeding, to say nothing of the danger of it, did not bother Val in the least, and it bothered Eddie less. He was satisfied, if Val was. If his conscience smote him a bit—that is, Val’s conscience, for Eddie had none except in Val’s name—he silenced it by the reflection that after all, they were his own books and they had been stolen from him. As the English say, he was merely getting back “a bit of his own.”

It was a mean looking alley, Delancey Place, and no mistake. Early, comparatively, as it was, the sidewalks of Delancey Place were bare and deserted. With