Marion turned to Dicksie. “You are not helping a bit. What do you think?”
“I don’t think woman and trouble ought to be associated even in figure; and I think ‘waits’ is horrid,” and Dicksie looked gravely at Whispering Smith.
McCloud, too, looked at him. “You’re in trouble now yourself.”
“And I brought it on myself. So we do seek it, don’t we? And trouble, I must hold, is like woman. ‘Waits’ I strike out as unpleasantly suggestive; let it go. So, then, trouble is like a lovely woman, loveliest when conquered. Now, Miss Dunning, if you have a spark of human kindness you won’t turn me down on that proposition. By the way, I have something put down about trouble.”
He was laughing. Dicksie asked herself if this could be the man about whom floated so many accusations of coldness and cruelty and death. He drew a note-book from a waistcoat pocket.
“Oh, it’s in the note-book! There comes the black note-book,” exclaimed McCloud.
“Don’t make fun of my note-book!”
“I shouldn’t dare.” McCloud pointed to it as he spoke to Dicksie. “You should see what is in that note-book: the record, I suppose, of every man in the mountains and of a great many outside.”
“And countless other things,” added Marion.