He called Mayne.
“Line up, old-timer. Have a shot.”
“I ain’t drinkin’,” Mayne snarled.
Robin, who had started toward him, and so stood between the two, heard Mayne add a rider to the sentence under his breath—“not with you, damn your soul!”
“No, you don’t drink, do you?” Mark laughed unpleasantly. “You just pour it down, that’s all. Come on, kid,” he spoke to Robin, “line up here. The old man’s on the prod, but the rest of us are sociable.”
Robin hesitated a moment. There was something in the air. There was a subtle shade of the peremptory in that “line up here.” The tone nettled him out of all reason. And he didn’t like the conjunction of Dan Mayne drunk and resentful in the same room with Shining Mark Steele.
“Leave me out this time,” he said casually. “Looks like I better put my boss to bed. I generally have to when he goes on a bust.”
“Suit yourself,” Steele replied tartly. “All the same to me.”
That muttered sentence of Mayne’s was apparently the last coherent speech he was capable of making. Robin got him out of the chair, steadied his uncertain progress across the way to the hotel and half-carried him up to a bedroom.
He sat down beside him, and piled a wet towel on Mayne’s head. In the course of half an hour the thickness of tongue and brain partially cleared.