Pudge O’Shay continued to grumble. Being a sparrow cop was no job for a flat-foot, especially a fat one, he declared. He was tired and sorry for himself out loud. After a small controversy, however, he withdrew his objection to the stroll, if not taken at speed.
The procession started along No. 1 Traverse, the shortest route to the Arsenal. The arresting officer led. The prime culprit, his young-old accomplice clinging to his arm, followed. The dismounted officer brought up as rear guard.
“Got a permit for your automatic?” Pape was able to ask Jane in a murmur well below the scrunch of feet.
“No. But I’ve got the automatic with me.”
“Slip it to me!”
He did not explain the request. Whether he meant to force a gun-point escape and needed her pistol to supplement his own against their two captors or whether he feared some such desperate initiative on her part, he left her to wonder. Watching their chance, he whispered “Now!” Next second he had safe inside his own coat pocket that very small, very black and very competent looking something with which she had commanded him in vain earlier in the day.
“Just try to trust me, Jane,” was his response to the unquestioning obedience which had produced it from the blouse beneath her old-lady black.
“To try to trust you is getting easier, Peter.”
The guarded admission sounded sweeter than the rhododendrons smelled. He felt happier going to jail with Jane than ever in his life before; was luxuriating in sentimentality when a roar like that of flaunted Fate lacerated the air. Pape started and stared about; saw that they were nearing Fifth Avenue and the menagerie that flanks the Arsenal; assumed that some monarch of the wild caged there had but vented his heart. A calming hand he placed over the girl’s two which had gripped his arm.
“Just a moth-eaten old lion dreaming of his native jungle and talking in his sleep.”