“If anybody in the world except you or the chief had handed that to me, Chick,” he said, “I’d have had to tear into him if I knew I was going to be licked to a standstill in the first round.”
“I beg your pardon, Patsy!” interrupted Chick. “I didn’t mean——”
“To think that you, Chickering Carter, would ever say that to me,” went on Patsy, his voice trembling. “Have I ever held back? Don’t you think I care as much about the chief as anybody? Why, I’d buck a charge of the Light Brigade for him, and chew up a thirteen-inch gun afterward, just to prove that I was with him first, last, and all the time. Gee! Chick! You’ve hurt me where I live! I’m sore, and I can’t help it.”
It did not take Chick more than thirty seconds to placate Patsy, but that was only because there was no time to be wasted in sentimentality. If there had been plenty of leisure, Patsy would have had to be coaxed and apologized to for half an hour.
That anybody should intimate, ever so indirectly, that he was not loyal to Nick Carter to the backbone, was something Patsy could not stand. When he said he was “sore,” he told only the truth. His feelings were rasped worse than they had been for many a long day.
So taken up had Patsy been with the injustice of Chick’s remarks that he had almost lost sight of the work before him. He was brought to himself by the sudden reappearance in the room of Phillips.
“The motor car is ready, sir,” announced Phillips, in the same well-modulated tone in which he would have said “Dinner is served, sir.”
They went downstairs, without seeing anybody about the place. Mala was not visible, and he had no assistants except his wife, who was hidden in the scullery most of the time.
Chick spent about ten minutes in the dusty roadway before he climbed into the car.
“Which way are we going, Chick?” asked Patsy, as he took his place by the side of his comrade, who was in the driver’s seat.