“Mrs. Big Joe looks up at me, and I’m bendin’ down close to the receiver that was against her ear. She pulled it away a little bit, so I could hear better. ‘This here’s too good to be true,’ she says, forgettin’ that anything was the matter of her. Then to Mike:
“‘What’s this you’re sayin’?’
“‘Sweeny’s goin’ to get his this afternoon,’ Mike tells her, ‘and I guess him and his rubberneckin’ wife is goin’ to have somethin’ to study about to-night,’ he says. Then we heard him laugh. ‘Ha-ha-ha!’ he says, ‘I bet they have their telephone tore out by the roots,’ he says. ‘And I bet she never rubbers again, as long as she lives.’
“Mrs. Big Joe gets awful anxious at that. ‘What you drivin’ at, Mike?’ she says.
“‘You’ll hear later on,’ he says. ‘I’m showin’ Dan Sweeny that he can’t make a monkey of me and get away with it,’ he says. ‘And I’m flatterin’ myself today that I’m clever enough to walk home alone, anyway. So Joe ain’t there? Well, I got to hunt him up. If you should happen to get him on the phone, tell him I said not to play that Whirlwind thing. It’s goin’ all up and down the line, and how it got loose I don’t know. Tell him, if you find him. Good-by.’ And Mike hung up b’fore we could get any more out of him.
“Mrs. Big Joe was so interested that she couldn’t hardly stay in bed.
“‘Tell me, Belle,’ she says, ‘what all this here funny business means,’ she says.
“I just set there and bowed my poor, whirlin’ head in my hands. For I seen it all now. The Wop had been nursin’ his grudge against Danny, and he had played a slick hand. He’d been callin’ up our number right along, figgerin’ that I’d rubber in and hear what was goin’ on. I s’pose he kept at it so long to be sure that I’d get the phony tip. He’d prob’ly been listenin’ for that little click you hear when somebody takes down another receiver on a party-line wire, and he’d found out when I was listenin’ that way, takin’ a chance, like all them gamblers does, that it was me, and not somebody else. And right now he was havin’ his little giggle and warnin’ his good fr’en’s off the information.
“It sure had me goin’, mister, and for a while I was so flustered that I couldn’t get my head workin’ even good enough to tell Mrs. Big Joe what had happened. Wasn’t it a’ awful thing, mister, me gettin’ my husban’ in wrong, through my sneakin’ ways?”
“I suppose you felt decidedly unpleasant,” the Boarder said. “But what of Doyle? Was he being slaughtered, too?”