Then, breathing heavily, he bent over his desk, wrote a short message on a form pad and pushed the buzzer-button with his thick finger. He carefully folded up the piece of paper as he waited.
“Get that off to Carpenter in Montreal right away,” he said to the attendant who answered his call. Then he swung about in his chair, with a throaty grunt of content. He sat for a moment, staring at the woman with unseeing eyes. Then he stood up. With his hands thrust deep in his pockets he slowly moved his head back and forth, as though assenting to some unuttered question.
“Elsie, you’re all right,” he acknowledged with his solemn and unimaginative impassivity. “You’re all right.”
Her quiet gaze, with all its reservations, was a tacit question. He was still a little puzzled by her surrender. He knew she did not regard him as the great man that he was, that his public career had made of him.
“You’ve helped me out of a hole,” he acknowledged as he faced her interrogating eyes with his one-sided smile. “I’m mighty glad you’ve done it, Elsie—for your sake as well as mine.”
“What hole?” asked the woman, wearily drawing on her gloves. There was neither open contempt nor indifference on her face. Yet something in her bearing nettled him. The quietness of her question contrasted strangely with the gruffness of the Second Deputy’s voice as he answered her.
“Oh, they think I’m a has-been round here,” he snorted. “They’ve got the idea I’m out o’ date. And I’m going to show ’em a thing or two to wake ’em up.”
“How?” asked the woman.
“By doing what their whole kid-glove gang haven’t been able to do,” he avowed. And having delivered himself of that ultimatum, he promptly relaxed into his old-time impassiveness, like a dog snapping from his kennel and shrinking back into its shadows. At the same moment that Blake’s thick forefinger again prodded the buzzer-button at his desk end the watching woman could see the relapse into official wariness. It was as though he had put the shutters up in front of his soul. She accepted the movement as a signal of dismissal. She rose from her chair and quietly lowered and adjusted her veil. Yet through that lowered veil she stood looking down at Never-Fail Blake for a moment or two. She looked at him with grave yet casual curiosity, as tourists look at a ruin that has been pointed out to them as historic.
“You didn’t give me back Connie Binhart’s note,” she reminded him as she paused with her gloved finger-tips resting on the desk edge.