“I rather get you,” said the reporter thoughtfully. “And, strangely enough, there’s just a dash in what you say. It’s the same nice, creepy, luxurious feeling that you get when you pull up closer to a good roaring fire with carpet slippers on your feet and a glass of something hot and sweet in your hand and listen to the wind yowling outside and see the rain on the black windowpanes. Nothing in the world to make you feel warm and safe and sheltered and cozy like a good storm or a good murder—what?”
“Nothing in the world,” agreed the red-headed girl; and she added pensively, “It’s always interested me more than anything else.”
“Has it indeed? Well, don’t let it get you. I’d just keep it as a hobby if I were you. At your present gait you’re going to make some fellow an awfully happy widow one of these days. Are you a good marksman?”
“You think that murder’s frightfully amusing, don’t you?” The red-headed girl’s soft voice had a sudden edge to it.
The real reporter’s face changed abruptly. “No, I don’t,” he said shortly. “I think it’s rotten—a dirty, bloody, beastly business that used to keep me awake nights until I grew a shell over my skin and acquired a fairly workable sense of humour to use on all these clowns called human beings. Of course, I’m one of them myself, but I don’t boast about it. And if you’re suffering from the illusion that nothing shocks me, I’ll tell you right now that it shocks me any amount that a scrap of a thing like you, with all that perfectly good red hair and a rather nice arrangement in dimples, should be practically climbing over that rail in your frenzy to find out what it’s all about.”
“I think that men are the most amusing race in the world,” murmured the red-headed girl. “And I think that it’s awfully appealing of you to be shocked. But, you see, my grandfather—who was as stern and Scotch and hidebound as anyone that ever breathed—told me when I was fourteen years old that a great murder trial was the most superbly dramatic spectacle that the world afforded. And he ought to have known what he was talking about—he was one of the greatest judges that ever lived.”
“Well, maybe they were in his day. And you said Scotch, didn’t you? Oh, well, they do it better over there. England, too—bunches of flowers on the clerks’ tables and wigs on the judges’ heads, and plenty of scarlet and gold, and all the great lawyers in the land taking a whack at it, and never a cross word out of one of them——”
“He used to say that is was like a hunt,” interrupted the red-headed girl firmly, “with the judge as master of the hounds and the lawyers as the hounds, baying as they ran hot on the scent, and all the rest of us galloping hard at their heels—jury, spectators, public.”
“Sure,” said the reporter grimly. “With the quarry waiting, bound and shackled and gagged till they catch up with him and tear him to pieces—it’s a great hunt all right, all right!”
“It’s not a human being that they’re hunting, idiot—it’s truth.”