“I'm giving you your orders. You will either go to Chicago, or you'll go up the river.”
Mary answered in a voice charged with cynicism.
“If you can convict me. Pray, notice that little word 'if'.”
The District Attorney interposed very suavely.
“I did once, remember.”
“But you can't do it again,” Mary declared, with an assurance that excited the astonishment of the police official.
“How do you know he can't?” he blustered.
Mary laughed in a cadence of genial merriment.
“Because,” she replied gaily, “if he could, he would have had me in prison some time ago.”
Burke winced, but he made shift to conceal his realization of the truth she had stated to him.