“The dead man,” he answered.
There was no light in the porch to-night. She opened the door, and, as he stepped inside, closed it behind him again. He could not see her in the darkness—and somehow, suddenly, quite unreasonably, he found the situation awkward, and his tongue, as it had been the night before, awkward, too.
“Say,” he blurted out, “your father's got some clever head, all right!”
“Has he?” Her voice seemed strangely quiet and subdued, a hint of listlessness and weariness in it.
“But you know about it, don't you?” he exclaimed. “You know what he did, don't you?”
“Yes; I know,” she answered. “But he has been waiting for you, and he is impatient, and we had better go at once.”
It was Tony Lomazzi! He remembered her grief when he had told her last night that Tony was dead. That was what was the matter with her, he decided, as he followed her along the passageway. She must have thought a good deal of Tony Lomazzi—more even than her father did. He wished again that he had not broken the news to her in the blunt, brutal way he had—only he had not known then, of course, that Tony had meant so much to her. He found himself wondering why now. She could not have had anything to do with Tony Lomazzi for fifteen years, and fifteen years ago she could have been little more than a child. True, she might perhaps have visited the prison, but——
“Well, my young friend—eh?” Nicolo Capriano's voice greeted him, as he followed Teresa into the old Italian's room. “So Ignace Ferroni has done you a good turn—eh? And old Nicolo! Eh—what have you to say about old Nicolo? Did I not tell you that you could leave it to old Nicolo to find a way?”
Dave Henderson caught the other's outstretched hand, and wrung it hard.
“I'll never forget this,” he said. “You've pulled the slickest thing I ever heard of, and I——”