"You've got around in the nick o' time," the husband said. "Steve's going away—East. He'll be back in awhile. Maybe a year. Maybe more. And when he comes back he—wants the boy. He wants to take him right away, and to raise him as his own. He reckons he's kind of adrift now, and the kiddie looks like handing him an anchor. He's yearning to make good for him, in a way that, maybe we, with our own two, couldn't hope to. We're guessing it's up to you. A year or so, and then you—hand him to his 'Uncle Steve.'"
Millie turned to the man who had battled for the boy's life. Her kindly eyes were promptly lit with all a good woman's sympathy. She remembered the man's passionate devotion to his own. She remembered the terrible disaster that had overtaken him. Her thought went no further. At the moment it was incapable of going further.
She turned to the husband awaiting her reply, and there was a suspicious moisture in her clear smiling eyes.
"Say, Mac," she cried in her half tender, half humourous way, "by the way you talk folk might guess you were scared to death of the wife who didn't know better than to take you for better or worse. Steve doesn't need to worry a thing. You know that. I don't know the rights of his claim by the laws of the folks who're set to worry us. But there's God's claim that don't need lawyers to make plain. Little Marcel, bless him, is his. If he comes, night or day, one year's time or ten, God willing, he'll be here waiting for him, and I'll hand him over with two of everything for the comfort of his sweet little body."
CHAPTER XIV
MALLARD'S
The ladder of crime has its bottom rung in Mallard's. Those who essay the perilous descent inevitably gravitate, sooner or later, at Mallard's. It was Saney who was responsible for the statement; and Saney was a shrewd "investigator," and certainly one of the most experienced amongst those whose lives were spent in an endeavour to beat the criminal mind of Eastern Canada.
Mallard's was somewhere on the water front of Quebec. It stood in a backwater where the busy tide of seafaring traffic passed it by. But it was sufficiently adjacent to permit its clientele swift and convenient access to the docks, at once a safety valve and the source of its popularity.
It was nominally a sailors' boarding-house. Heredity also conferred upon it the dignity of "hotel." Furthermore, its licence carried with it the privileges of a saloon. But its claims were by no means exhausted by these things.