His voice was cutting and insulting in its brutal sneer.
The frightened semi-cripple was struggling to her feet to leave the room, when a brawny, blue-coated young giant dashed through the still opened door.
He seized Vreeland’s wrist with an iron clutch and twisted him around before the startled young girl, while the old mother’s hands went up in a pious appeal. There was the hatred of hell on Vreeland’s face as he struggled in that vise-like grip.
“Forbear, Dan Daly! Remember that he’s under our roof,” the aged widow cried.
The young roundsman fixed a truculent glance upon the astonished Vreeland. “Apologize, both to the present and absent, you great hulking coward,” he cried. “If it were not for my blue coat, I’d throw you down stairs. And now get out the way you came. Be quick, too, about it!”
With a mumbled apology, crestfallen and raging at heart, Vreeland sneaked down stairs.
“I was a fool to get into this low Irish nest,” he growled, as he sprang into his coupé.
When safely back at the “Elmleaf” he reviewed the whole situation. “There’s a cold plant here! That woman has never left this town. I think that I’ll work the wires to Colorado Springs, and the detectives can handle California for me.”
He went out to a gay little late supper, not realizing that Dan Daly the Roundsman had just sworn a mighty oath to “keep his eye” on the elegant member of the “Swell Mob,” and all Daly’s oaths were sworn to for love’s sweet sake, and were doubly iron clad.
It was with a shiver of impending fear that Vreeland, pausing at a cigar store on Herald Square, accidentally overheard the night chatter of two late newspaper Bohemians: “I always thought Hugh Conyers was not a marrying man, but it seems that he is a quiet, sneaking lover after all.”