"Look here," he replied, "my wife is away back home, and I'm all alone over at that hotel."
He was leaning airily toward her, both hands on the counter. Katie, standing opposite, leaned toward him. She answered his smile, but he could not see that her smile was not of his own sort.
"Do you want to buy anything?" she demanded.
"Yes," said the customer, meeting her gaze again. "Will you sell?"
It was no unusual incident, no more unusual than the coming incident of Mirka's attack upon Hermann, but the girl had reached the end of her endurance, and what followed across that counter was not unlike what was to occur across Ludwig Schleger's bar. Katie opened her firm, pink palm and smacked the young bargain-seeker smartly across the mouth.
There was no immediate consequence. The aisle was too crowded to allow any but the nearest employees to witness the blow, and the crowd was too intent upon its own thousand errands to heed what happened before its eyes. One or two salesgirls stood still at their work, petrified by alarm. One or two customers hesitated and chuckled. And then, as the young man with a face of crimson shouldered his way into a hurried oblivion from which he never reappeared, the rush of business sent the clerks whirling about their own tasks and sent the crowd hurrying about its own purposes.
But Katie knew that more would follow, and that what would follow would be an interview with Mr. Porter. The shop's system of surveillance missed nothing, and within a half-hour the girl was standing in the dark office where she had first been hired.
In his likeness to a Sunday-school superintendent Mr. Porter was shocked and grieved to hear that any young lady in the Lennox store would strike a purchaser. In his likeness to a surgeon he promptly declared that there ought to be no issue short of expulsion. And in his own hidden character—deep in his own abominable character—he was wondering whether he could not turn this incident to the advantage that he had so long sought.
"The viper was insultin' me," said Katie.
"Are you quite sure of that, Miss Flanagan?"