Captain Mac was madder than she was drunk. All her sensations and her thoughts were combined in one ache, like the ache in a tooth, and she was biting upon it savagely and taking a kind of satisfaction in the keen shoots of her pain. She could have knifed Al that night out of hand and seen through stoically whatever might have come of it, but Jim Briggs’ voice and his eyes were the kind of things she had forgotten the existence of, and they slipped in under her guard and pierced the quick of her.
She didn’t throw the other saucer, but suddenly Rosie Ellen McCarthy, a decent Irish girl, looked out of her eyes and said with a flash of passionate appeal—
“For God’s sake, Jim, take me out o’ this!”
Jim didn’t expect it. It touched him so deeply that he could only gulp and nod his head. With his great height and bent shoulders and baggy clothes he looked uncouth and awkward, standing beside painted, half nude Captain Mac in her spangled dress. He looked around helplessly for something to cover her shoulders with.
“This’ll do,” she said, stretching out her hand for a yellow scarf on the top of a gilded upright piano.
She took it with one strong pull, slinging heedlessly along the floor in a rain of broken bits half a dozen pieces of bric-a-brac that had rested upon it.
Jim folded the gaudy stuff clumsily about her and took her by the arm and started to go out, when Al came up and stood in front of him, dapper, suave and touched with cynicism.
“There’s money owing me,” he said politely, “and she ain’t going nowhere till it’s paid, see?”
The red surged into Jim’s cheeks, pale from working underground, and his voice rose dangerously out of its soft rumble.
“There’s a hell of a lot more than money owing you, you God-forgotten little skunk, and if you don’t get out o’ my way I’m liable to pay you the part of it you ain’t lookin’ for!”