Carl laughed.
"Sit down," he invited, "and get it off your mind."
But Hunch's single eye was wandering in fascinated appraisal over Carl's dark, pleasant face. Even he, coarse and brutal in perception as he was, was conscious of a difference not wholly attributable to the Lithia League and felt himself impelled to some verbal recognition of his host's conspicuous well-being.
"Ye're on the level all right," he swore obscurely. "Ye're white! Ye're lookin' good, ye're lookin' fine— By the Lord Harry, Carl, I don't know as I blame yuh!"
Unable to fathom the nature of the censure thus withheld, Carl remained silent and Hunch fell again to staring, his immovable eye ridiculously expressive in stony conjunction with the other. Whatever he found in Carl's face this time plainly afforded him intense relief, for he seated himself with a long breath and drew a yellowish paper from his pocket.
"I says to meself," he explained, "'Hunch, old sport, ye're in for it. He'll like as not drop yuh out of the window with an electric wire, feed yuh to an electric wolf or make yuh play hell-for-a-minute chess or some other o' them woozy stunts 'at pop up in his bean like mushrooms, but yuh gotta square yerself with that paper. Yuh gotta get up yer nerve an' hike up there to the brownstone with it.' I ask yuh," he finished dramatically, and evidently laboring under the momentary conviction that Carl, too, was optically afflicted, "I ask yuh, Carl, to cast yer good lamp over that there paper."
Carl opened the paper and stared.
"Hunch," he exclaimed with an involuntary glance at the mended candlestick, "where in the devil did you get this?"
"I ask yuh to remember," went on Hunch in some excitement, "that I was drunk an' the old she-wol—Gr-r-r-r-r!" Hunch cleared his heavy throat in a panic, with a rasp like the stripping of gears, and corrected himself. "The Old One," he spoke somewhat as if this singular title was a degree, "the Old One put one over on me."
"My aunt, I imagine," said Carl, "has given me a fairly accurate version of His Nibs' escape. I'll admit a pardonable anxiety to interview you for a while. As a matter of fact there was a night—when I was not in the Lithia League—that I drove down to look you up. Tell me," he added, "where you found this."