“Well! I got to watching her and your Englishman. I watched them dancing in the hotel, and riding, and playing tennis at the Casino—I’d never seen any people like them.
“And pretty soon I got on to something; this Westridge gentleman was trying to buy the girl, but he didn’t want to pay for her. He was putting out the bait, but he had a string to it.
“I got on to his dope.
“If he could dazzle her into marrying him she’d get her board and clothes. The real thing that was next to his hide was his money. ‘All for me,’ that was the notion.”
He went on with no break in his words.
“I got to thinking about it. This little Westridge was forty; he’d never change; and the girl was at the age when the things he was dangling were all mixed up with moonshine. He might win, and if he did she was headed for hell.
“I saw it all clean out to the end.”
He moved in the chair.
“I used to set about, and look at her, and it made me cold all over. The devil was on the job right here just as he was in the Tenderloin. He was working on a higher-class line, but it was only a different sort of road to his same old hell.
“It would be a heavenly angel flung to a wolf no matter how you dressed the situation up; an’ I said to myself, ‘You can’t beat him. The devil’s got a set of traps for any kind of a layout!’”