Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/51

 "You saved me," he gulped hoarsely. "Boland didn't. He's as big a faker as I am and bigger, only there's a nut streak in me that keeps me from getting away with it the way he does. Look at him now—bluff you all—bluff you to a standstill. But some day I'll get the truth out. I would have told it to you this morning if you'd gone partners with me. I would have screamed it to 'em all before I'd let 'em—let 'em croak me," and his eyes rolled fearsomely toward the noose still hanging empty from the cross-arm. "But now," he gloated craftily, "now the brainstorm is over and I don't have to tell anybody till I get good and ready."

Henry was freshly indignant. "Go, you miserable faker," he rasped, "before I lose my self-control and kick you."

"Hard words, Henry," complained Hornblower, "when a man's trying to be grateful to you for saving his life. Just for that you'll be the last man I'll tell, Henry, the very last; and the time'll come when you'd rather have something on John Boland than on any man in the world. See if it don't! Then you'll think of it and ask me on your bended knees and damned if I know whether I'll tell you even then—unless it's to save your neck, the way you saved mine today."

"The buzzard!" summed up Henry, as he watched the man clamber down and waddle off, then was flushed with confusion to see that Mr. Boland was beckoning to him. When he discovered that Miss Billie Boland and her mother were upon the back seat of the car and must also have been witnesses of what had occurred, he blushed the deeper.

Yet once he arrived at the side of the automobile, nothing in their reception of him tended to increase the