"There's only one thing to unfix the things I've stuck together," he said. "It's the—woman."
And Bill's agreement added to his fears of the moment.
"Sure. But you haven't figgered on—Pap."
"Pap?"
Bill nodded.
"There's fourteen days. Pap's crazy mad about Maude and the boy. The boy won't figger to quit things for fourteen days. If I'm wise he'll boost all he needs into them. Well—there's Pap."
Bill was looking on with both eyes wide open, as was his way. He had put into a few words all he saw. And Kars beheld in perfect nakedness the dangers to his plans.
"We must get busy," was all he said, but there was a look of doubt in his usually confident eyes.
Maude lived in an elaborate house farther down the main street, and Alec Mowbray was on his way thither. He had kept from Kars the fact that his midday meal was to be taken with the woman who had now frankly abandoned herself to an absorbing passion for the handsome youth from the wilderness "inside."
It was no unusual episode in the career of a woman of her class. On the contrary, it was perhaps the commonest exhibition of her peculiar disposition. Hundreds of such women, thousands, have flung aside everything they have schemed and striven for, and finally achieved as the price of all a woman holds sacred, for the sake of a sudden, unbridled passion she is powerless to control. Perhaps "Chesapeake" Maude understood her risks in a city of lawlessness, and in flinging aside the protection of such a man as Pap Shaunbaum. Perhaps she did not. But those who looked on, and they were a whole people of a city, waited breathless and pulsating for the ensuing acts of what they regarded as a human comedy.