Cautiously watching them, Patsy presently decided that he was right, and that Kate Crandall was not acquainted with Turk Magill. She remained talking with him, nevertheless, frowning darkly while likening to his earnest utterances, yet occasionally glancing apprehensively toward a house around the corner.
“Gee! he’s got something on her,” thought Patsy, after a few moments. “That’s dead open and shut, or she wouldn’t listen to him. She’s doing so under protest; that’s a cinch.”
Magill was a well-built, florid man, a thousand times more prepossessing externally than within, and Patsy[Pg 20] quickly saw that the rascal’s arguments, persuasion, or of whatever his talk consisted, would not immediately prove effective.
He saw, too, that he could not directly approach the couple without incurring suspicion, but that he might hasten around the square and approach them through the other street, possibly getting a line on their talk by passing near them.
“It’s worth trying,” he said to himself. “The woman, at least, cannot give me the slip.”
Patsy did not defer this move. Sheltered by the tree then hiding him, he retraced his steps and darted through a near street, presently rounding the square and sauntering toward the couple from the other direction. While he still was some fifty yards away, however, Kate Crandall abruptly left Magill and hastened to the dwelling at which she had repeatedly glanced.
Patsy rightly inferred that it was where she boarded. He passed her just as she was entering the gate, noting that she looked pale and disturbed, and had an ugly gleam in her black eyes.
Patsy also saw that Magill was watching her from around the corner and knowing the utterly depraved and desperate character of the crook, he instantly adopted a ruse that he thought might prove profitable and enable him to get a line on the game Magill was playing.
Though he heard Kate enter the house and close the door, Patsy repeatedly glanced back over his shoulder, as if hard hit with her flashy style and personal beauty.
Upon turning the corner and coming face to face with Magill, however, Patsy pretended to see him for the first time, and to realize that his own covert admiration of the woman had been detected. He grinned, remarking rudely, as if by way of explanation: