“If you touch him or try to turn him off I’ll call in a cop and have you all pinched,” and she swept her hand at them with an inclusive movement.
“Don’t go off your nut like that, everything will be all right,” said Jack. “You’ll get your bit, no matter what happens, but you’re talking like a crazy woman. You never used to be like this. You’ve been in tougher jobs before. You just think you’re stuck on this Joe because he writes you a nice letter, but there’s nothing to it. You stick to me and I’ll stick to you, and this bundle will put us on Easy Street. Why don’t you be nice?”
She had partly turned her back on them and was looking at one of the pictures on the wall.
It is when a woman is silent that she is most dangerous, because then she is thinking. Give a woman time to think and you are simply supplying her with ammunition. But the stupid man who had dominated by brute force knew nothing of this. To him her silence meant acquiescence, and he scented an easy victory.
With a quick, alert nod of his head he motioned the other two from the room, and they left silently and like automatons, their feet on the carpet giving forth no sound, but her senses were keen and she knew when they had gone. As the door closed behind them she turned around with a smile on her face.
“I think,” she said, “that you will be a fool as long as you live. Here I find a man with a big roll, and arrange to have him bring it to us on a gold plate and you turn around, make me give my hand away, and declare those two dead ones in on the play. You’ll never have sense if you live to be a hundred years old.”
He looked at her admiringly.
“You’re better than I thought,” he said at last. “We’ll jump to Europe on this. Wait ’till I get a paper and see if there is a ship sailing to-morrow morning. We’ll make a quick getaway from the whole crowd.”
He almost ran through the door in his eagerness.
He was back in a few moments with a newspaper in his hand. Eagerly he scanned the columns devoted to shipping news.