“Do you reckon some of the Black Hands are out on the street, rubbering to see if there are any signs of anything doing?”
“Perhaps; you might let Birdsall keep a watch for anything like that. But they hear, somehow; there is a leak somewhere in our establishment. It is not your aunt; she can hold her tongue as well as use it; the boy, Archie, does not know anything to tell—”
“He wouldn’t tell it if he did,” interrupted the colonel; and very concisely but with evident pride he gave Archie’s experience in the Chinese quarter.
Keatcham’s comment took the listener’s breath away; so far afield was it and so unlike his experience of the man; it was: “Winter, a son like that would be a good deal of a comfort, wouldn’t he?”
“Poor little chap!” said Winter. “He hasn’t any father to be proud of him—father and mother both dead.”
Keatcham eyed Winter thoughtfully a moment, then he said: “You’ve been married and lost children, your aunt says. That must be hard. But—did you ever read that poem of James Whitcomb Riley’s to his friend whose child was dead? It’s true what he says—they were better off than he ‘who had no child to die.’”
Rupert was looking away from the speaker with the instinctive embarrassment of a man who surprises the deeper feelings of another. He could see out of the window the lovely April garden and Janet Smith amid the almond blossoms. Only her shining black head and her white shoulders and bodice rose above the pink clusters. She looked up and nodded, seeing him; her face was a little pale, but she was smiling.
“I don’t know,” he said, “it’s hard enough either way for a man.”
“I never lost any children”—Keatcham’s tone was dry, still, but it had not quite the former desiccated quality—“but I was married, for a little while. If it’s as bad to lose your children as it is to lose the hope of having them, it must be hard. You lost your wife, too?”
“Yes,” said Rupert Winter.