"Who is this swell guy you speak of--this banker?"
Curly looked at Marriott with the suspicion that was necessarily habitual with him, but his glance softened and he said:
"I don't know him myself. I never saw him--his name's Hunt, no, Hunter, or some such thing. Know him?"
Marriott's heart leaped; he struggled to control himself.
"Course, you understand, Mr. Marriott," said Curly, fearing he had been indiscreet, "this is all between ourselves."
"Oh, of course, you can depend on me."
He was anxious now to get away; he could scarcely observe the few decencies of decorum that the place demanded. And when he was once out of the prison, he called a cab and drove with all speed to Gibbs's place. On the way his mind worked rapidly, splendidly, under its concentration. When he reached the well-known quiet little saloon in Kentucky Street, Gibbs took him into the back room, and there, where Gibbs had been told of the desperate plights of so many men, Marriott told him of the plight of Dick Ward. When he had done, he leaned across the table and said:
"And you'll help me, Dan?"
Gibbs made no reply, but instead smoked and blinked at Marriott curiously. Just as Marriott's hopes were falling, Gibbs broke the silence:
"It's the girl you're interested in," he said gruffly, "not the kid."
He looked at Marriott shrewdly, and when Marriott saw that he looked not at all unkindly or in any sense with that cynical contempt of the sentimental that might have been expected of such a man, Marriott smiled.
"Well, yes, you're right. I am interested in her."
Gibbs threw him one look and then tilted back, gazed upward to the ceiling, puffed meditatively at his cigar, and presently said, as if throwing out a mere tentative suggestion:
"I wonder if it wouldn't do that old geezer good to take a sea-voyage?"
Marriott's heart came into his throat with a little impulse of fear. He felt uneasy--this was dangerous ground for a lawyer who respected the ethics of his profession, and here he was, plotting with this go-between of criminals. Criminals--and yet who were the criminals he went between? These relations, after all, seemed to have a high as well as a low range--was there any so-called class of society whom Gibbs could not, at times, serve?
"Let's see," Gibbs was saying, "where is this now? Canada used to do, but that's been put on the bum. Mexico ain't so bad, they say, and some of them South American countries does pretty well, though they complain of the eatin', and there's nothing doing anyway. A couple of friends of mine down in New York went to a place somewhere called--let's see--called Algiers, ain't it?"
Marriott did not like to speak, but he nodded.
"Is that a warm country?"
"Yes."
"Where is it?"
"It's on the shores of the Mediterranean."
"Now that don't tell me any more than I knew before," said Gibbs, "but if the climate's good for old guys with the coin, that's about all we want. It'll make the front all right, especially at this time o' year."
Marriott nodded again.
"All right, that'll do. An old banker goes there for his health--just as if it was Hot Springs."
Gibbs thought a moment longer.
"Now, of course, the kid's father'll make it good, won't he? He'll put up?"
"Yes," said Marriott. He was rather faint and sick about it all--and yet it was working beautifully, and it must be done. Even then Ward was pacing the floor somewhere--and Elizabeth, she was waiting and depending on him. "Shall I bring you his check?"
"Hell, no!" exclaimed Gibbs. "We'll want the cash. I'll get it of him.
The fewer hands, the better."
Marriott was wild to get away; he could scarcely wait, but he remembered suddenly Curly's commissions, and he must attend to them, of course. He felt a great gratitude just now to Curly.
When Marriott told Gibbs of Curly's request, Gibbs shook his head decidedly and said:
"No, I draw the line at refereeing domestic scraps. If Curly wants to go frame in with a moll, it's his business; I can't do anything." And then he dryly added: "Nobody can, with Jane; she's hell!"
XXVIII
One morning, a week later, as they sat at breakfast, Ward handed his newspaper across to Elizabeth, indicating an item in the social column, and Elizabeth read:
"Mr. Amos Hunter, accompanied by his daughter, Miss Agnes Hunter, sailed from New York yesterday on the steamer _King Emanuel_ for Naples. Mr.
Hunter goes abroad for his health, and will spend the winter in Italy."
Elizabeth looked up.
"That means--?"
"That it's settled," Ward replied.
She grew suddenly weak, in the sense of relief that seemed to dissolve her.
"Unless," Ward added, and Elizabeth caught herself and looked at her father fearfully, "Hunter should come back."
"But will he?"
"Some time, doubtless."
"Oh, dear! Then the suspense isn't over at all!"
"Well, it's over for the present, anyway. Eades can do nothing, so Marriott says, as long as Hunter is away, and even if he were to return, the fact that Hunter accepted the money and credited it on his books--in some fashion--would make it exceedingly difficult to prove anything, and of course, under any circumstances, Hunter wouldn't dare--now."
Elizabeth sat a moment idly playing with a fork, and her father studied the varying expressions of her face as the shades came and went in her sensitive countenance. Her brow clouded in some little perplexity, then cleared again, and at last she sighed.
"I feel a hundred years old," she said. "Hasn't it been horrible?"
"I feel like a criminal myself," said Ward.
"We are criminals--all of us," she said, dealing bluntly, cruelly with herself. "We ought all of us to be in the penitentiary, if anybody ought."