"It's the girl you're interested in," he said gruffly, "not the kid." He looked at Marriott shrewdly, and when Marriott saw that he looked not at all unkindly or in any sense with that cynical contempt of the sentimental that might have been expected of such a man, Marriott smiled.
"Well, yes, you're right. I am interested in her."
Gibbs threw him one look and then tilted back, gazed upward to the ceiling, puffed meditatively at his cigar, and presently said, as if throwing out a mere tentative suggestion:
"I wonder if it wouldn't do that old geezer good to take a sea-voyage?"
Marriott's heart came into his throat with a little impulse of fear. He felt uneasy--this was dangerous ground for a lawyer who respected the ethics of his profession, and here he was, plotting with this go-between of criminals. Criminals--and yet who were the criminals he went between? These relations, after all, seemed to have a high as well as a low range--was there any so-called class of society whom Gibbs could not, at times, serve?
"Let's see," Gibbs was saying, "where is this now? Canada used to do, but that's been put on the bum. Mexico ain't so bad, they say, and some of them South American countries does pretty well, though they complain of the eatin', and there's nothing doing anyway. A couple of friends of mine down in New York went to a place somewhere called--let's see--called Algiers, ain't it?"
Marriott did not like to speak, but he nodded.
"Is that a warm country?"
"Yes."
"Where is it?"