Archie faced about and held out his left wrist toward Danner. The handcuffs clicked, Marriott turned, glanced at Archie, but he could not bear to look in his white face. Then he heard Danner's feet and Archie's feet falling in unison as they passed out of the courtroom.
XXIII
Danny Gibbs, having recovered from the debauch into which Archie's fate had plunged him, sat in his back room reading the evening paper. His spree had lasted for a week, and the whole tenderloin had seethed with the excitement of his escapades. Now that it was all over and reason had returned, he had made new resolutions, and a certain moral rehabilitation was expressed in his solemn demeanor and in the utter neatness of his attire. He was clean-shaven, his skin glowed pink from Turkish baths, his gray hair was closely trimmed and soberly parted, his linen was scrupulously clean; he wore new clothes of gray, his shoes were polished and without a fleck of dust. His meditations that evening might have been profoundly pious, or they might have been dim, foggy recollections of the satisfaction he had felt in heaping scathing curses on the head of Quinn, whom he had met in Eva Clason's while on his rampage. He had cursed the detective as a representative of the entire race of policemen, whom he hated, and Quinn had apparently taken it in this impersonal sense, for he had stood quietly by without resenting Gibbs's profane denunciation. But whatever Gibbs's meditations, they were broken by the entrance of a woman.
She was dressed just as she had always been in the long years Gibbs had known her, soberly and in taste; she wore a dark tailor suit, the jacket of which disclosed at her full bosom a fresh white waist. She was gloved and carried a small hand-bag; the bow of black ribbon on her hat trembled with her agitation; she was not tall, but she was heavy, with the tendency to the corpulence of middle years. Her reddish hair was touched with gray here and there, and, as Gibbs looked at her, he could see in her flushed face traces of the beauty that had been the fatal fortune of the girlhood of Jane the Gun.
"Howdy, Dan," she said, holding out her gloved hand.
"Hello, Jane," he said. "When'd you come?"
"I got in last night," she said, laying her hand-bag on the table. "Give me a little whisky, Dan." She tugged at her gloves, which came from her moist hands reluctantly. Gibbs was looking at her hands,--they were as white, as soft and as beautiful as they had ever been. One thing in the world, he reflected in the saddened philosophy that had come to him with sobriety, had held unchanged, anyway.
"I said a little whisky, Dan!" she spoke with some of her old imperiousness.
"No," he said resolutely, "you don't need any. There's nothing in it." He was speaking out of his moral rehabilitation. She glanced at him angrily; he saw that her brown eyes, the brown eyes that went with her reddish hair and her warm complexion, were flaming and almost red. He remembered to have seen them flame that dangerous red before. Still, it would be best to mollify her.
"There ain't any more whisky in town," he said, "I've drunk it all up."