“Can’t say I have.” Bill shook his great head. “But maybe they’d get a bad time if they set their traps for any special flies—or fly.”
Fyles raised his powerful shoulders coldly.
“Guess the spider business doesn’t go far enough,” he said, talking directly at Big Brother Bill. “When I spoke of that lever just now, maybe you didn’t get my meaning quite clearly. That gang, who ran the liquor in last night, put themselves further up against the law than maybe they think. It was an armed attack on the police, which is quite a different thing to just simple whisky-running. Get me? The police are always glad when crooks do that. It pays them better—when the time comes.”
Bill had no reply. He suddenly experienced the chill of the cold steel of police methods. A series of painful pictures rose up before his mind’s eye, which held his tongue silent. Helen quickly came to his rescue.
“But who’s to say who did it?” she demanded.
Fyles smiled down into her pretty face.
“Those who want to save their skins—when the time comes.”
It was Helen’s turn to realize something of the irresistible nature of the work of the police. Somehow she felt that the defeat of the police last night was but a shadowy success after all, for those concerned in the whisky-running. Her thought flew at once to Charlie, and she shuddered at the suggested possibilities in Fyles’s words.
She turned away.
“Well, all I can say is, I—I hate it all, and wish it was all over and done with. Everybody’s talking, everybody’s gloating, and—and it just makes me feel scared to death.” Then she turned again to Bill. “Let’s go on,” she cried, a little desperately. “We’ll finish our shopping, and—and get away from it all. It just makes me real ill.”