Mrs. Milton flushed with vexation, for she was sure that he had come back to town thus unexpectedly with the idea of surprising her; that he must have gone home and questioned Fanny as to her mother's whereabouts, and then have followed to Alexander's solely for the satisfaction of spoiling her pleasure—unless a little for the sake of seeing his late antagonist figuring as a waiter.
Milton sauntered over to the table and spoke to everyone civilly, darting only one covert, ugly glance at his wife, when her fascinated gaze rested upon the fading bruise which discoloured his square jaw.
"Read 'Light' this morning, Tony, and the afternoon papers copying it," he said. "Thought I'd drop in at the cockfight and see the fun. Great stunt, isn't it?" He eyed Loveland up and down, as if the Englishman were a freak at a museum. "Of course the story was yours?"
For the first time Val's eyes and Tony's met, only for an instant, but there was something like reproach in Loveland's. A trapped hare might have thrown a look like that at the keeper who trapped him.
"I suppose he thinks it was revenge for the slammed door," the young newspaperman said to himself. "But it wasn't. I'm not that kind of chap. I'd like him to know I'm not. But I expect it'll have to go at that."
"Well, ta ta!" said Milton, "and I'll order something for the good of the house, now we're here. We're not obliged to eat it, thank Heaven."
He turned away, and was drawing out a chair for himself near one upon which the seedy, bearded stranger had placed a small leather handbag, when suddenly the whole restaurant seemed alive with dry, crackling explosions, and in the same instant the electric lamps went out. The room, a moment ago brilliantly lighted, was black as a vault, save for a glimmer from the street that shone through the window. Then, as everyone jumped up, overturning chairs or breaking glasses in their hurry and the shrieks of the Italian women mingled with the strange crackling sounds, there came from somewhere at the back a loud detonation, followed by a hoarse roaring like a blast furnace. Men cried out in amazed alarm, and the dark room lit up ominously with a crimson glare that turned the curtain through which it leaked the colour of blood.
In rushed Black Dick and his assistant, with Blinkey, who had been busy in the kitchen, and all three shouted wildly: "Fire! Fire!"
The restaurant was in a state of chaos. A long jet of flame, sweeping out from the kitchen and across the narrow passage, caught the curtain in the door-way, up which little serpents of fire began to crawl. Every woman was screaming now, in a panic of fear whipped to horror by the red darkness, and the crackling explosions which snapped and spluttered on every side. The excitable Italians chattered and struggled with one another in the dark, the new Polish waiter ran here and there like a frightened chicken that sees the axe; the two negroes were almost in convulsions, and Tony Kidd called vainly on the Hungarian brothers and de Rocheverte for help in bringing order out of confusion.
The thought that flashed through the minds of all was an anarchist plot—a dynamite bomb. For one terrible second everybody remembered the bearded stranger with the little bag, and debited him with the deadly mischief—everyone, perhaps, except Loveland and Tony Kidd.