Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/78

 dialect of the east side streets where he spent his youth.

“H-mm!” Val cleared his throat importantly. So there were mysterious men following him in taxicabs. That was good. He could have wished for nothing better. There might be adventure later—there would be fighting, and blood, and kisses—how did one manage to live until the next night; to pass the time stupidly until seven thirty of the next evening at the Giltmore Hotel and⸺”

“Is that all, sir?” broke in Eddie.

“All right, Eddie. You can go. I’ll watch out for them.”

Seated at a window of the club he watched the kaleidoscope that is Fifth Avenue and pitied the passers-by who probably lived such uneventful sordid existences that nobody shadowed them, nobody made attacks on their lives; they did not know Jessica Pomeroy, to say nothing of never having made up their minds to marry said Jessica Pomeroy—which, by the way, Val had already decided to do. For some people life was very drab and lusterless.

“Some filly, that,” remarked a drawling voice next to him. He turned, roused from his reverie, and beheld Freddy Vandenburgh, who lived, thought and expressed himself only in terms of the race track. Freddy nodded to a girl getting into a machine at the curb.

“Oh, fair,” admitted Val, hesitating to admit that, with the exception of one, there were any good looking girls in the world.

“I say, Val, you’re just the man I wanted to see,” said Freddy. “You see, I’ve got a good, first hand, sure-fire tip on the third race at Belmont to-morrow and⸺”