A shriek. A bouncing across the gangplank and into the cubby-hole just as Andy was rounding, happily, into thirteen hundred. A hand clutching his shoulder frantically, whirling him bodily out of the creaking swivel chair. Parthy, hat awry, bosom palpitating, eyes starting, mouth working.
“On Canal Street!” she wheezed. It was as though the shriek she had intended were choked in her throat by the very force of the feeling behind it, so that it emerged a strangled thing. “Canal Street! The two of them . . . with my own eyes . . . driving . . . in a . . . in a——”
She sank into a chair. There seemed to be no pretense about this. Andy, for once, was alarmed. The tall shambling figure of Frank, the heavy, passed the little ticket window, blocked the low doorway. He stared, open-mouthed, at the almost recumbent Parthy. He was breathing heavily and looked aggrieved.
“She ran away from me,” he said. “Sees ’em in the crowd, driving, and tries to run after the carriage on Canal, with everybody thinking she’s gone loony. Then she runs down here to the landing, me after her. Woman her age. What d’yah take me for, anyway!”
But Parthy did not hear him. He did not exist. Her face was ashen. “He’s a murderer!” she now gasped.
Andy’s patience, never too long-suffering, snapped under the strain of the afternoon’s happenings. “What’s wrong with you, woman! Have you gone clean crazy! Who’s a murderer! Frank? Who’s he murdered? For two cents I’d murder the both of you, come howling in here when a man’s trying to run his business like a business and not like a yowling insane asylum——”
Parthy stood up, shaking. Her voice was high and quavering. “Listen to me, you fool. I talked to the man on the docks—the one he was talking to—and he wouldn’t tell me anything and he said I could ask the chief of police if I wanted to know about anybody, and I went to the chief of police, and a perfect gentleman if there ever was one, and he’s killed a man.”
“The chief of police! Killed a man! What man!”
“No!” shrieked Parthy. “Ravenal! Ravenal’s killed a man.”
“God A’mighty, when?” He started as though to rescue Magnolia.