“Woman haters?” Matt spat disdainfully. “There ain’t no such thing as a woman hater, Tommy, in the whole animal kingdom. Don’t you fall for none of that stuff. But, believe me, that girl never opened that door. She’s a straight, honest, smart girl, if she is flighty.”
“Well, if she didn’t, who did?”
“I don’t know. I ain’t sleuthed around enough yet to find out. Hullo, here’s Boston—half asleep, too.”
Scott was angry clear through. He did not stop to analyze his emotions—he was not of an analytical mind—and he did not care why he was angry. He felt that Polly Street, a girl of whom he was beginning to think rather highly, had done an unsportsmanlike thing; a thing that Bob’s sister ought to have been ashamed to do; had disgraced the family, so to speak, and had seriously inconvenienced him into the bargain.
Scott had depended on that automobile for various things. He wanted it to fetch a doctor for Jimmy, and to take Polly, herself, to the border in comfort. Both these important things she had jeopardized because she had been coaxed into it by a soft-spoken young man with dark eyes. The treasure story he put aside. Even a girl from the East would hardly have taken that stuff seriously, he thought.
He would have felt just the same, he reasoned, had the culprit been Bob instead of Bob’s sister. There was, thank Heaven, nothing soft about him! He could see and hear and even enjoy a good-looking girl without making a fool of himself. That was the beauty of being on the way to forty—one saw things in their right light—and did not make a fool of one’s self over girls.
“Marc Scott, are we being raided again or what? Did I hear a shot and a machine going by or was I dreaming?” demanded Mrs. Van, who, clad in a blanket kimono, her feet thrust into moccasins, and a gay-looking pink boudoir cap on her head, came to the door before Scott reached it. In her rear could be dimly seen another figure, wrapped in a gray blanket.
“You ought to know,” said Scott, rudely; focussing his attention on the pink cap and ignoring the blanketed figure in the rear.
“What do you mean—I ought to know?” indignantly.
“Somebody has unlocked the office door and let that half-breed get away and he’s taken his car with him,” said Scott. “The key’s in your house—that’s all.”