“You—partly,” he blurted out. “Put something on and come outside. I want to talk to you.”
“No,” she refused bluntly; and then, to temper the bluntness: “’Tis no good it can do now, Davie, and ’twould do you harm. There be tongues to wag, even in Powder Can, and you’re the chief on the big job.”
“But I must see you and talk with you!” he insisted.
“’Twill do no good,” she repeated. “I’ve made my bed, Davie, and I’ve got to lie on it.”
The bar-room throng was jostling them as they stood, and David saw the bartender marking them through half-closed eyes. He fancied there was crafty suspicion in the look, but at the moment he was thinking chiefly of the obligation that he must not shirk.
“I shall come again, in daytime,” he said. “You are living on the Murtrie claim?”
“You must not!” she forbade quickly. “’Twould be—it might be as much as your life’s worth! Nor must you stay here talking to me. Go now, or the Plegg man will be asking questions that you can’t answer!” And with that she slipped aside and lost herself in the throng on the dancing-floor.
David Vallory was gravely silent on the remainder of the round of investigation; and Plegg, knowing that something sobering had happened at Dargin’s dance-hall, respected his chief’s mood. But on the way back to the construction camp the silence was broken by David himself.
“You saw the woman I was talking to in that place across from the Murtrie ore yard?”
“Yes, I saw her.”