The questions came with a rush. They seemed to whistle on the smoke haze of the room. Fyles removed his pipe and rubbed its bowl gently on the leg of his yellow-striped breeches.
“You can’t let a lone girl, a half-breed, face the women of a city like this.”
“You haven’t arrested her?”
Fyles watched the eager face so tortured by anxiety. He shook his head and returned his pipe to his mouth.
“What makes you so crazy sure she killed Sinclair? She didn’t.”
The policeman’s quiet confidence had immediate effect. The Wolf caught himself under control. He flung his cigarette end into a cuspidor and lit a fresh one.
For some moments there was no verbal reply. But the Wolf was watching, watching. He was measuring the sturdy man in the chair. He was striving with all his might to read behind the unsmiling mask of the man who had committed the biggest failure of his career and yet was strong enough to feel no grievance against those who had helped him to it.
At last a sound broke seemingly from behind clenched teeth. The eyes that looked into the face of the policeman were almost pleading.
“Say, Sergeant, d’you reckon we’re men? Or are you just a red-coat, an’ me a bootlegger?”
The manner of it was superbly ingenious. And Fyles understood the simplicity of the nature lying behind it.