CHAPTER XIII
Something Unexpected
The food at Joey Loo's lost its savor for Bat Scanlon. He felt cold, and his mind was sodden; a weight seemed to oppress his chest. The picture limned by the desperado was as plain to him as though it had been done in fire.
He saw the callous, ruthless Bounder, all smiles and sneers, strike Nora and snatch her jewels. He also saw the beautiful, high-strung and high-spirited creature, her senses drowned in resentment, snatch up a weapon and rush after him, all the wrong she had ever suffered at his hands flaming up in her mind.
"And so she followed him; and this hyena followed her," was Scanlon's thought. "And in the end they all brought up at Stanwick."
Why Nora and Big Slim had gone to the suburb was easy to understand; they had followed the Bounder. But why had that gentleman gone there? What had taken him there—a place he had never visited before—and so late in the night? That he had gone there had been only too tragically proven; and the footprints found by Ashton-Kirk gave mute testimony as to the other two. And then there was that shining thing the burglar saw Nora place in her bosom. With a sickening readiness, this associated itself with the glittering little weapon which the investigator had picked up on the lawn.
Bat blundered on with his food, for all these things were huddling up in his mind in a frantic mass. And, then, as if the tangle were not already bad enough, there came the remembrance of the scene he had observed through the windows at Bohlmier's hotel.
"I don't know what that was about any more than the rest," Bat told himself. "But there was something between it and the things this fellow has just been telling me. If I knew what they were——"
He looked at Big Slim and found the green eyes of the burglar regarding him curiously.
"You don't bat very high in the eating league, do you?" said the man. "Or maybe you ain't crazy about the Chink brand of grub."