Again he said, “Our friend. So far as I can trace him back, he hadn’t been worse than a ‘gun’ up to that job on Dorothy Crewe; that was a borderland act for him. He started it out like a ‘gun’ and finished up rough. With Win Scofield, he was all the way a ‘gorilla’!”
“Gunman you mean by ‘gun’?” I asked.
“Almost the opposite, Steve. A ‘gun’s’ a guy who gives action to his brain instead of to his cannon; he gets by without the shootings. A gorilla’s a guy that goes in for the rough stuff. A girl doesn’t worry when she’s got a good ‘gun’ for her gentleman friend; she’s personally as safe with him as with any church warden. He hasn’t any hankering for doing a croak; and he hasn’t any habit of getting out of his troubles that way. But when a guy that a girl goes with takes to being a gorilla, the skirt’s got to watch her step with him. She knows it.”
“Where is he now, Jerry?”
“Do you suppose I know?”
“You must know more than I do.”
“That’s right.” He tossed me a box of cigarettes. “Smoke if you want. Nobody’ll come for a while. I allowed us a little time, particularly so you may become better acquainted with my friend—” again he tapped his chest—“Keeban, my childhood companion, more recently the robber of Dorothy Crewe and the bumper off of old Win Scofield. He seems not to be indigenous to Chicago soil, Steve. Assuming that he was—and therefore is—a twin of mine, it is likely that my parents were merely visiting here when they loosed me in the park, and you and I met, old Top. Anyway, they must have moved on to New York, for my friend made his reputation there.
“I haven’t been able to gather anything about my own people—no more than you can judge from him and me. Maybe they turned us both loose at the same time and I walked into the hands of a wholesale grocer while a gerver picked him up.”
“Gerver?”