"Well!" the detective summed up his scrutiny—"if that front didn't make you the spit of the devil, I'd lay long odds you were none other than my poor dear pal, the late Mike Angelo Lanyardi."
"It isn't sporting to bet on a certainty," the guest severely pointed out. "And I'm sorry you think I'm late, my good Crane; but I'd rather far be that than never."
"It would be a whole lot healthier for you to be never, in this neck-o'-the-woods. If you haven't got sense enough to stay put in your watery grave—"
"How shall an unquiet spirit withstand the temptation thus to revisit these glimpses of the moonshine?" Lanyard sipped his drink with unaffected relish. "Prime stuff, my friend! and I will be glad to fetch you its fellow if you'll only be nice and forget for a time you're a limb of the law whose sworn duty it is to pinch out of hand revisitants, like me, from another and a wetter world."
"The devil himself couldn't twist the King's English into such ornery knots," Crane declared. "I'm convinced: it is indeed the Lone Wolf who lurks behind those lovely whiskers."
"You may be right," Lanyard admitted. "Unhappily, I for one can't altogether share your certainty."
Crane made nothing of that, so let it pass. "Such behind the case," he pursued, "a man-size slug of Scotch would be some solace to my conscience."
"On your promise to be peaceable?" Lanyard stipulated, rising.
"Speaking as one who has seen you act up when your sense of self-preservation was hitting on all six, I don't mind passing you my word, you're in no danger of my starting any rukus without a gun."
"Or with one, I trust very truly."