“You are a cool specimen!” ejaculated the other.
“Oh, I guess I know men; and I sized you up, first thing, in the court-room. You’re the sort o’ man I want. You’re not a funker, and you’ve got brains, and—well, if you don’t come out of this quite a few thousand to the good, it’s all your own fault!”
Durkin whistled softly. Then he looked meditatively out at the flashing motor-cars as they threaded their way up the crowded avenue.
“Well, I guess I’m game enough,” he said, hesitatingly, still trying to sweep from his brain the clouding mental cobweb that it was all nothing more than a vivid nightmare.
“I guess I’m your man,” he repeated, as they turned off the Avenue, and drew up in front of a house of staid and respectable brownstone facing, like so many of the other private houses of New York’s upper Forties. In fact, the long line of brownstone edifices before him seemed so alike that one gigantic hand, he thought, might have carved the whole block from a single slab of that dull and lifeless-looking brownstone rock.
Then, following MacNutt, he jumped out and went quickly up the broad stone steps.
“So you’re with us, all right?” the older man asked, as his finger played oddly on the electric button beside the door. Durkin looked at the blank glass and panels that seemed to bar in so much mystery, and his last quaver of indecision died away. Yet even then he had a sense of standing upon some Vesuvian-like lava-crust, beneath which smouldered unseen volcanic fires and uncounted volcanic dangers.
“Yes, I’m with you, anyway,” he asserted, stoutly. “I’m with you, to the finish!”
CHAPTER II
It was a full minute before the door swung open; and the unlooked-for wait in some way keyed the younger man’s curiosity up to the snapping point. As it finally opened, slowly, he had the startled vision of a young woman, dressed in sober black, looking half timidly out at them, with her hand still on the knob. As he noticed the wealth of her waving chestnut hair, and the poise of the head, and the quiet calmness of the eyes, that appeared almost a violet-blue in contrast to the soft pallor of her face, Durkin felt that they had made a mistake in the house number. But, seeing MacNutt step quickly inside, he himself awkwardly took off his hat. Under the spell of her quiet, almost pensive smile, he decided that she could be little more than a mere girl, until he noticed the womanly fullness of her breast and hips and what seemed a languid weariness about the eyes themselves. He also noted, and in this he felt a touch of sharp resentment, the sudden telepathic glance that passed between MacNutt and the woman; a questioning flash on her part, an answering flash on the other’s. Then she turned to Durkin, with her quiet, carelessly winning smile, and held out her hand,—and his heart thumped and pounded more drunkenly than it had done with all MacNutt’s bootlegger’s gin. Then he heard MacNutt speaking, quietly and evenly, as though talking of mere things of the moment.