"'Well, Bill, she's up,' and without a word to either of us they swung themselves through the opening in the boulders and disappeared."
The coterie had listened in their usual absorbed way whenever Marny had the floor. His experience, like Mac's, covered half the world. Boggs had not taken his eyes from Marny's face during the entire recital.
"And that's all you know about them?" asked Lonnegan in a serious tone.
"Except what the landlord told us," continued Marny in answer, turning to Lonnegan. "The two men, he said, had stopped at the tavern about nine o'clock that night, had asked who was on top, and had hurried on; all they wanted was a stable lantern, which he lent them, and which they didn't return. He had never seen either of them before, and they didn't pass the tavern on their way back."
"What did you think of the affair?" asked Pitkin in a serious tone of voice.
"We had only two conclusions. They had either come to rob us, and were scared off by the toy pistol, or they were carrying out a wager of some kind."
"And it took you all night and the next day to find that out?" exclaimed Boggs in a tone of assumed contempt. "Really, gentlemen, this whole afternoon should go on record as the proceedings of a kindergarten. Just think what rot we've had: Lonnegan promises a poor workingman a job and takes to his heels to cheat him out of his pay; Marny, who, like Mac, poses as a philanthropist, and claims to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, refuses shelter to two half-drowned tourists who come up to see the sunrise, and instead of hustling round to get 'em hot tea and grub, he posts his big brother in a corner with a gun where he can blow the tops of their heads off. Rot—all of it! But what I object to most is the 'let-down' at the tag-end of each of these yarns. You work up to a climax, and nothing happens. Just like one of these half-baked modern plays we've been having—all the climax in the first act, and a dreary drivel from that on till the curtain drops. I expected Marny's yarn would taper off in a hand-to-hand death struggle; both men thrown over the cliff; the finding of their mangled bodies, impaled on the trees, by the sheriff, who had tracked them for years, and who promptly identified both scoundrels, one as 'Dead House Dick' and the other as 'Murder Pete'; a vote of thanks to the two heroes by the State legislature, one of whom, thank God! is still with us"—and he bowed grandiloquently at Marny—"and a ring-down with a beautiful, unknown woman, supposed to be an heiress, creeping in at twilight to weep over their graves, all the stage lights turned down and a low tremolo going on in the orchestra. Tamest, deadest lot of twaddle I've heard around this fire! Now let me tell you a yarn that means something. Blood this time—red blood. None of your dress-suit and warmed-up tea and toy-pistol adventures."
Everybody straightened up in his chair to get a better view of Boggs. The Chronic Interrupter was about to appear in a new rôle. The speaker opened his coat, tossed back the lapels as if to give his plump body more room, and rose slowly to his feet, his black diamond-pointed eyes glistening, his lips quivering with suppressed merriment. It was evident that Boggs was loaded to the muzzle; it was also evident, from the unusual earnestness of his manner, that he was about to fire off something of more than usual importance.
"No preliminaries, mind you. Right to the spot in a jump. This happened in Stamboul the winter I made those sketches of the mosques."