“I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking of the risks to you,” Teddie rather wearily explained. “I was rather selfishly remembering the risks to myself.”
“Well, yuh ain’t suffered none from it, have yuh?” derided her still indignant-eyed cross-examiner.
“I’ve just paid Raoul Uhlan twenty-five thousand dollars as compensation for his injuries,” explained Teddie, as coolly as she was able.
Gunboat Dorgan fell back, gaped a little, and then swallowed hard.
“Yuh paid—yuh paid that mutt—that money—for—for what he’d get tarred and feathered for—down in my Ward!” he gasped, wide-eyed with incredulity.
Teddie nodded.
And Gunboat, seeing that movement of acquiescence, repeated: “Twenty-five thousand dollars!” Then he began to stride meditatively back and forth, pacing the studio-rug with his characteristic panther-like step. Teddie watched him, without speaking, without moving. She watched him until he came to an abrupt stop.
“Say, Ruby was right in this, after all,” he suddenly proclaimed. “I was the guy who got off his trolley. Yuh—yuh looked so good to me I got my numbers mixed. I got to dreamin’ things. But twenty-five thousand bucks in cold cash ain’t no dream. And d’ yuh know what I’m goin’ to do, and do right now? I’m goin’ up to that Uhlan guy and get that twenty-five thousand back. Just so ’s yuh can see I’m a little more on the level than yuh’ve been imaginin’. I’m goin’ to make that studio-lizard come across wit’ that dough—with that dough,” he amended, remembering, in his excitement, certain old-time admonitions as to the utterance of his mother-tongue.
“But I don’t want you to do that!” cried Teddie, harboring a strangely muddled-up and reluctant admiration for the deluded young fire-eater with the Saint Anthony light in his blazing blue eyes.
“Of course yuh don’t, for the thing’s got yuh buffaloed the same as yuh got me buffaloed,” proclaimed the knight of the ring. “And the whole lay-out’s wrong. The only thing that got hurt about that guy was his dignity. I knew what I was doin’ all the time. I held back on the sleep-punch, and played wit’ him. I didn’t give him anything that a pound of beefsteak wouldn’t put right inside o’ twenty-four hours—and he knows it as well as I do. But now he’s pulled this blackmail stuff I’m goin’ to put him wise to how I was toyin’ wit’ him. I’m goin’ to let him see that if he ever so much as opens his trap about this business he’s goin’ to have it decorated wit’ a double set o’ plates when I get through wit’ him—when I get through with him. And the next time he’ll holler so loud for help they’ll be fannin’ him wit’ a hearse-plume before he’s finished!”