“You see a sparrow behind every bush. Schwartz is a rotter, but he is behaving himself. Why, I have known Jim shift a quart of beer after he had said he wasn’t thirsty, just because Mam told him to get some lemonade.”
“Have you ever picked a bone after turning up your nose at a dog biscuit?” I asked.
“Yes, but there might have been cat in the biscuit.”
I turned my back on him. He thinks that sort of low-down humor is clever, and he hurries away to tell Bob how he scored off me. Of course, he made tracks to the stable the moment dinner was ended, with the result that he missed quite a thrilling episode.
Mam and Dorothy went to the drawing-room, but Schwartz, who was listening intently, heard Minkie go into the morning-room, whither I had followed her to study the mongoose at leisure. After a minute or two, he made the excuse that he wanted to show the Guv’nor a letter which he had left upstairs, and he came out, though I heard Poll warbling “Kiss me and call me your darling.”
He closed the door, walked across the hall to the foot of the stairs, and tip-toe’d back to the morning-room. Minkie looked at me, and I looked at Minkie.
“Now for it!” she whispered.
Schwartz entered. He had the glint in his eyes which I feel when I have a young thrush within range of a spring. He never turned his head, but kept glaring at Minkie while he fumbled with the lock till the door was shut. Then he crept, rather than walked, towards her.
“Now, you young devil!” he hissed, “give it to me, or I’ll strangle you.”
That was the right opening; I began to feel nervous, and when I say “nervous” I don’t mean “frightened,” like Evangeline is when the villain says something of the sort in the story she reads each week in the Society Girl’s Companion; in fact, if she begins to wash up after finishing the instalment she is sure to smash something. No; that is the mistake Dan always makes. Had he been in the room during the next few minutes he would have alarmed the house by his stupid barking, because any one could see that Schwartz meant mischief. Certainly Dan would have bitten him first, whereas I hid under the leather chair. Chacun à son gout, as mademoiselle used to say when she saw Minkie kissing Bob’s nose—my motto is “Defence, not defiance.” But the species of nervousness I experienced was shared by Minkie. It was a kind of spiritual exaltation, a bracing of the muscles, a tuning of the heart-strings which carries one through a desperate crisis.