"It's not a matter of bigness. He won't fight that way. He would never fight in the open. He knows his chances, and the country, and just where to turn, and just how far to go—and where to hide, if he has to!"
"That's true enough, I suppose. But oh, if I only had him in New York, I'd fight him to a finish, and never edge away from him and keep on the run this way!"
"Of course; but, as you say, is it worth while? After all, he's only an accident in the whole affair now, though a disagreeable one. And, what's more, Pobloff will never follow us out of Europe. This is his stamping ground. He had misfortune in America, and he's afraid of it. As I said before, Pobloff and Keenan are the acid and the alkali that ought to make the neutral salts. I mean, instead of trying to save them from each other, we ought to fling them together, in some way. Let Pobloff do the hunting for us—then let us hunt Pobloff!"
"But Keenan is wary, and shrewd, and far-seeing. How is he to be caught, even by a Pobloff?"
"That only time and Pobloff can tell. It will never be by brigandage—Keenan will never go far enough afield to give him a chance for that. But I feel it in my bones—I feel that there is danger impending, for us all."
Durkin turned and looked at her, wondering if her woman's intuition was to penetrate deeper into the unknown than his own careful analysis.
"What danger?" he asked.
"Impending dangers cease to be dangers when they can be defined. It's nothing more than a feeling. But the strangest part of the whole situation is the fact that not one of us, from any corner of the triangle, dares turn to the police for one jot of protection. None of us can run crying to the arms of constituted authority when we get hurt!"
A consciousness of their lonely detachment from their kind, of their isolation, crept through Durkin's mind. He felt momentarily depressed by a sense of friendlessness. It was like reverting to primordial conditions, wherein it was ordained that each life, alone and unassisted, should protect and save itself. He wondered if primitive man, or if even wild animals, did not always walk with that vague consciousness of continual menace, where lupine viciousness seemed eternally at war with vulpine wariness.
"Then what would you suggest?" he asked the woman, who sat before him rapt in thought.