“I might as well ask where you get your gall, Harvey,” returned de Spain, watching Logan hunch Sandusky toward the left that both might crowd him closer. “I was born with my beauty-mark––just as you were born with your damned bad manners,” he added composedly, for in hugging up to him his enemies were playing his game. “You can’t help it, neither can I,” he went on. “Somebody is bound to pay for putting that mark on me. Somebody is bound to pay for your manners. Why talk about either? Sassoon, set out for your friends––or I will. Spread, gentlemen, spread.”
He had reached the position on which he believed his life depended, and stood so close to the end of the bar that with a single step, as he uttered the last words, he turned it. Sandusky pushed close next him. De Spain continued to speak without hesitation or break, but the words seemed to have no place in his mind. He was thinking only, and saw only within his field of vision, a cut-glass button that fastened the bottom of Sandusky’s greased waistcoat.
“You’ve waited one day too long to collect for your strawberry, de Spain,” cried Logan shrilly. “You’ve turned one trick too many on the Sinks, young fellow. If the man that put your mark on you ain’t in this room, you’ll never get him.”
“Which means, I take it, you’re going to try to get me,” smiled de Spain.
“No,” bellowed Morgan, “it means we have got you.”
“You are fooling yourself, Harvey.” De Spain addressed the warning to Logan. “And you, too, Sandusky,” he added.
“We’ll take care of that,” grinned Logan. Sandusky kept silence.
“You are jumping into another man’s fight,” protested de Spain steadily.
“Sassoon’s fight is our fight,” interrupted Morgan.