“Of course you have! And you’re a fool to go broke in the teeth of a cinch like this. First thing, though, how’d you ever come to get pinched by Doogan? Here, take another drink—hot stuff, eh! Now, how’d you ever come to get you’self pulled that fool way?”
“I had been living like a street cat, for a week. An Eighth Avenue manufacturing electrician I went to for work, took me up and showed me a wire on his back roof. He advanced me five dollars to short-circuit it for him. Doogan’s men caught me at it, and Doogan tried to make me out an ordinary overhead guerrilla.”
“Lightnin’-slinger, eh?”
“Yes, a lightning-slinger.”
“But I s’pose you notice that he didn’t appear against you?”
“Yes, I saw that! And that’s a part of the business I can’t understand,” he answered, puzzled by the stranger’s quiet smile.
“Say, Durkin, you didn’t think it was your good looks and your Fifth Avenue talkin’ got you off, did you?”
The younger man turned on him with half-angry eyes. But the stranger only continued to chuckle contentedly down in his throat.
“You remind me of a hen who’s just laid an egg!” cried Durkin, in a sudden flash of anger. The other brushed the insult carelessly aside, with one deprecatory sweep of his fat hand.
“Why, I had Doogan fixed for you, you lobster!” he went on, as easily and as familiarly as before. “You’re the sort o’ man I wanted—I saw that, first crack out o’ the box. And a friend o’ mine named Cottrell happens to stand pat with Muschenheim. And Muschenheim is Doogan’s right-hand man, so he put a bee in the Boss’s ear, and everything was—well, kind o’ dropped!”