Then for an instant the scuffling in the room ceased, and the pasty-faced man's voice came in a peremptory whisper:
“The minute any one shows at the door you swing that safe open as though you'd been working at it all the time, Birdie, and pretend to shove everything in sight into your pockets. And you, Joe, you've got me cornered and covered here—see? And you hold the doorway with your gun too; and then both of you back away and make your getaway through the window.” The scuffling began again. John Bruce watched the scene, a sense of drowsiness and apathy creeping upon him. He tried to rouse himself. He ought to do something. That vicious-faced little crook who had haunted him with unwelcome visitations, and who at this precise moment had the bulk of the money from the safe in his own pockets, was in the act of planting a somewhat crude, but probably none the less effective, alibi, and——
John Bruce heard a door flung open, and then a sudden, startled cry, first in a woman's and then in a man's voice. But he could not see any door from the position in which he lay. He turned over with a great effort, facing the other way, and reached out with his fingers for the panel of the screen that overlapped the head of the cot. And then John Bruce lay motionless, the blood pounding fiercely at his temples.
He was conscious that a tall, white-haired man in scanty attire was there, because the doorway framed two figures; but he saw only a beautiful face, pitifully white, only the slim form of a girl whose great brown eyes were very wide with fear, and who held her dressing gown tightly clutched around her throat. It was the girl of the traveling pawn-shop, it was the girl of his dreams in the shaft of sunlight, it was the girl he had followed here—only—only the picture seemed to be fading away. It was very strange! It was most curious! She always seemed to leave that way. This was Larmon now instead, wasn't it? Larmon... and a jack-knife... and a quill toothpick... and....
CHAPTER SEVEN—THE GIRL OF THE TRAVELING PAWN-SHOP
JOHN BRUCE abstractedly twirled the tassel of the old and faded dressing gown which he wore, the temporary possession of which he owed to Paul Veniza, his host. From the chair in which he sat his eyes ventured stolen glances at the nape of a dainty neck, and at a great coiled mass of silken brown hair that shone like burnished copper in the afternoon sunlight, as Claire Veniza, her back turned toward him, busied herself about the room. He could walk now across the floor—and a great deal further, he was sure, if they would only let him. He had not pressed that point; it might be taking an unfair advantage of an already over-generous hospitality, but he was not at all anxious to speed his departure from—well, from where he was at that precise moment.
And now as he looked at Claire Veniza, his thoughts went back to the night he had stepped, at old Hawkins' invitation, into the traveling pawn-shop. That was not so very long ago—two weeks of grave illness, and then the past week of convalescence—but it seemed to span a great and almost limitless stretch of time, and to mark a new and entirely different era in his life; an era that perplexed and troubled and intrigued him with conditions and surroundings and disturbing elements that he did not comprehend—but at the same time made the blood in his veins to course with wild abandon, and the future to hold out glad and beckoning hands.
He loved, with a great, overwhelming, masterful love, the girl who stood there just across the room all unconscious of the worship that he knew was in his eyes, and which he neither tried nor wished to curb. Of his own love he was sure. He had loved her from the moment he had first seen her, and in his heart he knew he held fate kind to have given him the wound that in its turn had brought the week of convalescence just past. And yet—and yet—— Here dismay came, and his brain seemed to stumble. Sometimes he dared to hope; sometimes he was plunged into the depths of misery and despair. Little things, a touch of the hand as she had nursed him that had seemed like some God-given tender caress, a glance when she had thought he had not seen and which he had allowed his heart to interpret to its advantage with perhaps no other justification than its own yearning and desire, had buoyed him up; and then, at times, a strange, almost bitter aloofness, it seemed, in her attitude toward him—and this had checked, had always checked, the words that were ever on his lips.