“Giving a bad check to the druggist for medicine. She did the same thing at the grocer’s. It’s a dirty trick, I say, to arrest the poor thing. Why, the grocer’s bill was only a few dollars. They don’t eat enough to keep my canary. The man eats mostly almonds. Something wrong with his stomach, and that seems to be all he can eat. Funny, ain’t it?”
The garrulous woman led Lanagan to a doorway in the rear. He knocked and, in response to a feeble voice, entered.
Propped up with two pillows was a young man whose wasted features were bright with a hectic flush; whose arms, hanging loosely from his gown, were shrunk to the bone and sinews. The eyes were grey, steady, and assured; so much so that Lanagan half halted on the threshold as he felt the response in his own sensitive brain to the personality that flashed to him through those eyes. A man of mental power, thought Lanagan; of swift decision and of iron will.
The voice was little more than a gasp, but each word by effort was clearly uttered.
“You’re an upper office man?”
“No. I am a newspaper man. Why did you ask that?”
“Because they were here and took my sister for overdrawing what little funds we had in bank.”
There was concentrated fury in his weak voice.
“Still I am curious to know how you knew they were plain-clothes men that took her?”
“How? A newspaper man ask how? Because they walk like a ton of pig lead. And didn’t that cursed grocer threaten to have her arrested for a paltry four or five dollars? I heard her scream when they took her. This”—more quietly, with a slight shrug and comprehensive gesture to indicate his wasted form and flushed cheeks—“this particular complaint serves to strengthen our outer faculties for a while at least, even if it is at the expense of our inner ones.”