Larry could see nothing, but there was no mistaking that voice. “Red Hannigan!” he exclaimed.
“Yes—you damned squealer! And I'm going to finish you off right here!”
The light clicked out, and a pair of lean hands almost closed on Larry's wind-pipe. But Larry caught the wrists of the older man in a grip the other could not break. There was a brief struggle in the blackness of the closet, then the slighter man stood still with his wrists manacled by Larry's hands.
“Evidently you haven't a gun on you, Red, or you, wouldn't have tried this,” Larry commented. “Anyhow, you couldn't have got away with killing in a big hotel, whether you had strangled me or shot me. I don't blame you for being sore at me, Red—only you've got me all wrong. But you and I are evidently here for the same purpose: to get next to something that's going to happen out in the room. What do you say, Red?—let's suspend hostilities for the present. You've got me where you can follow me, and you can get me any time.”
“You bet I'll get you!” declared Hannigan. And then after a few more words an armistice was agreed upon between the two men in the closet and silently, tensely, they stood in the dark awaiting whatever was to happen.
Outside Maggie, that amateur playwright who had tried so desperately to prearrange events, that inexperienced goddess from the machine, stood in a panic of fear and suspense the like of which she had never known.
CHAPTER XXXIV
But when Barney's latch-key slid into the door and Barney, in a smart dinner jacket, came in, Maggie was herself again. Indeed she was better than herself, for there rushed to her support that added power which she had just been despairing of, which carries some people through an hour of crisis, and which may occasionally lift an actor above himself when fortune gives him a difficult yet splendid part which is the great chance of his career.
And Maggie showed to the eye that she was better than her best, for Barney exclaimed the instant he was beside her: “Gee, Maggie, you look like the Queen of Sheba, whoever that dame was! Any guy would fall for you to-night—and fall so hard that he'd break, or go broke!”