“Sure,” admitted Carrington. “Why not?”
Parsons looked leeringly at Carrington. “Suppose I should tell her?”
Carrington glared at the older man. “You won’t,” he declared. “In the first place, you don’t love her as an uncle should because she looks like Larry Harlan—and you hated Larry. Suppose I should tell her that you were the cause of the trouble between her parents; that you framed up on her mother, to get her to leave Larry? Why, you damned, two-faced gopher, she’d wither you!”
He grinned at the other and got up, turning, when he reached his feet, to see Quinton Taylor, standing beside a chair at the next table, just ready to sit down, but delaying to hear the remainder of the extraordinary conversation carried on between the two men.
Taylor had donned the garments he had discarded in Kansas City. A blue woolen shirt, open at the throat; corduroy trousers, the bottoms stuffed into the soft tops of high-heeled boots; a well-filled cartridge-belt, sagging at the right hip with the weight of a heavy pistol—and a broad-brimmed felt hat, which a smiling waiter held for him—completed his attire.
Freshly shaved, his face glowed with the color that betokens perfect health; and just now his eyes were also glowing—but with frank disgust and dislike.
Carrington flushed darkly and stepped close to Taylor. Carrington’s chin was thrust out belligerently; his eyes fairly danced with a rage that he could hardly restrain.
“Listening again, eh?” he said hoarsely. “You had your ears trained on us yesterday, in the Pullman, and now you are at it again. I’ve a notion to knock your damned head off!”
Taylor’s eyelids flickered once, the little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepening a trifle. But his gaze was steady, and the blue of his eyes grew a trifle more steely.
“You’ve got a bigger notion not to, Mr. Man,” he grinned. “You run a whole lot to talk.”