"All right. I may have to pull that little incident on Mr. Hatch before I get through with him. The train hold-up was a criminal act, and you are the witness who can convict the pair of them. Of course, we'll leave Mrs. Macrae and the little girl entirely out of it. Nobody knows that they were there with us, and nobody need know."
I agreed to that, and this mention of Mrs. Sheila and Maisie Ann makes me remember that I've been leaving them out pretty severely for a good long while. They weren't left out in reality-not by a jugful. In spite of all the rush and hustle, the boss had found time to get acquainted with Major Basil Kendrick and had been made at home in the transplanted Kentucky mansion in the northern suburb. I'd been there too, sometimes to carry a box of flowers when the boss was suddenly called out of town, and some other evenings when I had to go and hunt him up to give him a bunch of telegrams. Of course, I didn't play the butt-in; I didn't have to. Maisie Ann usually looked out for me, and when she found out that I liked pumpkin pie, made Kentucky fashion, we used to spend most of those errand-running evenings together in the pantry.
But to get back on the firing line. I wasn't around when Mr. Norcross had his "declaration of war" talk with Hatch. Mr. Norcross, being pretty sure he wasn't going to have that evening off, had sent me out to "Kenwood" with a note and a box of roses, and when I got back to the office about eight o'clock, Hatch was just going away. I met him on the stair.
The boss was sitting back in his big swing chair, smoking, when I broke in. He looked as if he'd been mixing it up good and plenty with Mr. Rufus Hatch—and enjoying it.
"We've got 'em going, Jimmie," he chuckled; and he said it without asking me how I had found Mrs. Sheila, or how she was looking, or anything.
I told him I had met Mr. Hatch on the stair going down.
"He didn't say anything to you, did he?" he asked.
"Not a word."
"I had to pull that Sand Creek business on him, and I'm rather sorry," he went on. "He and his people are going to fight the new company to a finish, and he merely came up here to tell me so—and to add that I might as well resign first as last, because, in the end, he'd get my goat. When I laughed at him he got abusive. He's an ugly beggar, Jimmie."
"That's what everybody says of him."