“All right, then. I’m takin’ care of yuh. Remember that. We’ll cut out the hot-air artists and get busy. And that brings us round to this newspaper boob. He’s got the whole story of what’s been happenin’ here, and he’s talkin’ big about puttin’ it into print. I heard him wit’ my own——”
“He won’t put it into print,” interrupted Gerry.
“What’ll stop him?” demanded the man of battle.
“The knowledge of what we’d both do to him if he tried it,” announced the expounder of law, doing his best to overlook Gunboat’s oblique glance of contempt. “And the further knowledge that he never even intended to put it into print.”
“No, putting things into print doesn’t seem to be my business any more,” interpolated the morose-eyed Lipsett.
“Then why——” began Gunboat, but he was interrupted by the trill of the telephone bell. It was Teddie who finally crossed to the instrument and answered the call.
“It’s for you, Mr. Dorgan,” she said, without emotion, as she waited with the receiver in her hand.
“Oh, is that yuh, Ruby,” Gunboat was murmuring a moment later, into the transmitter. He spoke in a strangely altered tone, a tone with even a touch of meekness in it. “All right, Ruby,” he docilely agreed after several minutes of an obviously one-sided conversation. “Sure, Ruby, yuh’re dead right.” Then came the receiver’s turn again, with an amending “Whatever yuh say, Ruby,” gently intoned into the transmitter.
If Teddie garnered any inkling of that capitulating meekness on Gunboat Dorgan’s part, she gave out no echo of it in her own icy stare of disapproval as she stood regarding Gerald Rhindelander West. Even the rueful Louis Lipsett awakened to that oddly sustained duel of glances between the two silent figures on the far side of the room. He awakened, in fact, to the all-pervading, three-cornered preoccupation which surrounded him. And he made hay while the sun shone. He took advantage of that momentary inattention and slipped from his chair. He tiptoed discreetly out of the room and hurried away into the comparative quietness of Fourth Street, where he caught a Broadway surface-car and headed for the peace of Park Row.
Gunboat Dorgan, as he meditatively hung up the receiver, did not even miss the vanished newspaper man. He was too busy watching the strange couple still confronting each other on the far side of the studio. The girl, with ice-cold deliberation, pinned a tiptilted turban on her head, adjusted a four-piece blue-fox throw about her shoulders, and drew on a pair of wrinkled-topped gloves.