"Here comes the boy," said the gambler. "I'll watch the score of the next game you pitch to see what you do."
CHAPTER VI
Adonis Makes a Deal
The after theater crowd was trooping into the lobby of the hotel in laughing, chattering groups and drifting steadily toward the café, in which already gay parties were gathered at the tables. Manager Clancy and his wife, with Secretary Taber and his daughter, came together and they stood undecided, the men urging that they go to the restaurant for a lunch before retiring, and Miss Taber, laughing, declaring that too much pleasure in one day was bad for them. At that moment Williams, a little flushed, swaggered across the lobby, and, lifting his hat, advanced toward the group. The girl smiled pleasantly in response to his greeting, but as he spoke again she stiffened indignantly and retired a step involuntarily, as she saw he had been drinking.
"So you prefer that red-headed prison bird to me?" he asked in sneering tones.
Betty Tabor flushed, then turned pale and facing the handsome, half drunken fellow, she gazed at him steadily until, in spite of his swaggering attitude, he grew uneasy and dropped his eyes. Then she spoke. She spoke just one word, vibrant with all the scorn and anger in her being.
"Yes."
Without a glance at him she turned and stepped into the waiting car, leaving Williams staring blankly in the elevator well. The cold scorn of the girl's single word had stung him more deeply than a volume of rebuke would have done. Half maddened by jealousy and drink he turned to cross the lobby, forgetting to replace his hat, and Clancy, whose attention had been attracted by the pitcher's pursuit of the girl, grasped him by the shoulder and said sternly:
"Williams, if you take another drink to-night it will cost you a month's pay."