“Don’t think you can scare me, Jode. You can’t. If you want a tussle, don’t think for a minute that you’d have the easy end of it. I know you better than anybody else does—better even than your fool of an uncle, who let you pull the wool over his eyes for so long. You’re a coward. When you saw the money in that old woman’s hand bag, you wanted it just as much as I did, only you didn’t have the nerve to take it. Well, I had the nerve; and I was so clever about it that she’ll never know it’s gone until she wants to pay a bill. Now get a grip on yourself and don’t act like a blooming idiot.”
Lenning shivered slightly. The gleaming eyes of his companion were still boring into his brain, and somehow they robbed him of all desire to resent with his fists the hard words Shoup had spoken.
“It seems to me as though, if you’re bound to steal, you could pick out some one else for a victim,” Lenning grumbled. “That poor old woman—I can see her face now, with that lock of gray hair falling down from under that rusty old hat and—and—oh, it makes me sick just to think of it!”
He turned away in gloomy protest. Shoup laughed.
“Fine!” said he. “I didn’t know, Jode, that there was so much maudlin sentiment wrapped up in you. How do you know the old lady is so poor, eh? You can’t always judge from appearances. The biggest miser I ever knew—an old curmudgeon that looked like a tramp, had more than a hundred thousand in the bank. There’s two hundred in this roll, and it will stake us until luck begins coming our way.”
The first shock of disgust had passed and Lenning began to take a little interest in his friend’s recent achievement.
“You didn’t lose that morocco case at all, eh?” he asked.
“Not at all; that was merely an excuse for me to go back to the stage and pull off my little play.”
“Suppose I had gone with you to help hunt for the case?”
“I was pretty sure you wouldn’t.”