“Free as a lark, Mr. Rash. One young lydy ’as turned you down, and the other ’as gone to the bad for you; so if you was to begin agyne with a third you’d ’ave a clean sheet.”
He groaned aloud. “Ah, go to ––”
But without stating the place to which Steptoe was to go he marched out of the room, and back to his dressing upstairs.
More dispassionate was the early morning scene in the little basement eating house in which the stunted Hebrew maid of Polish culture was serving breakfast 287 to two gentlemen who had plainly met by appointment. Beside the one was an oblong packet, of which some of the contents, half displayed, had the opulent engraved decorations of stock certificates.
The other gentleman, resembling an operatic brigand a little the worse for wear, was saying with conviction: “Oil! Don’t talk to me! No, sir! There’s enough oil in Milligan Center alone to run every car in Europe and America at this present time; while if you include North Milligan, where it’s beginnin’ to shoot like the Old Faithful geyser––”
“Awful obliged to you, Judson,” the other took up, humbly. “I thought that bunch o’ nuts ’d never––”
“So did I, Gorry. I’ve sweated blood over this job all winter. Queer the way men are made. Now you’d hardly believe the work I’ve had to show that lot of boneheads that because a guy’s a detective in one line, he ain’t a detective in every line. Homicide, I said, was Gorry Larrabin’s specialty, and where there’s no homicide he’s no more a detective than a busted rubber tire.”
“You’ve said it,” Gorry corroborated, earnestly. “One of the cussed things about detectin’ is that fellas gets afraid of you. Think because you’re keepin’ up your end you must be down on every little thing, and that you ain’t a sport.”
“Must be hard,” Judson said, sympathetically.