“I’ve just been telling these birds——” began Cuccini.
“Oh, shut up, Lew!” growled one of his friends. “If that crazy man hadn’t been shouting your name, we should not have gone back! He’d have wakened the dead. And our orders were to retire at the first serious sign of an alarm. That’s right, doctor, isn’t it?”
“Sure it’s right,” said the doctor blandly. “Never be caught—that is a good motto. Cuccini was caught.”
“And I’d give a year of my life to meet that Dago again,” said Cuccini, between his teeth.
He was delightfully inconsistent, for he came into the category, having been born in Milan, and had had his early education in the Italian quarter of Hartford, Connecticut.
“He’d have tortured me too . . . he was going to put lighted wax matches between my fingers——”
“And then you spilled it!” accused one of the three hotly. “You talk about us bolting!”
“Silence!” roared the doctor. “This is unseemly! I have forgiven everything. That shall be enough for you all. I will hear no other word.”
“Where is Gurther?” Cuccini asked the question.
“He has gone away. To-night he leaves for America. He may return—who knows? But that is the intention.”