Sadie was near cryin with the mad in her, she bein' a hard loser at any game. "You're an old fraud, that's what you are!" she spits out. "And you're just marrying Pinckney's silly old aunt to get her money."
But that rolls off Doc like a damage suit off'm a corporation. He just smiles back at her, and goes to chirkin' up Aunt Tillie. Doc was it, and knew where he stood. He had us down and out. In five minutes more he'd have a two-hundred-pound wife and a fifty-thousand-dollar income.
"It strikes me," says he, over his shoulder, "that if I had got hold of a fortune in the way you got yours, young woman, I wouldn't make any comments about mercenary marriages."
Well, say, up to that time I had a half-baked idea that maybe I wasn't called on to block his little game, but when he begins to rub it into Sadie I sours on Doc right away. And it always does take one or two good punches to warm me up to a scrap. I begins to do some swift thinkin'.
"Hold on there, Doc," says I. "I'll give in that you've got our case quashed as it stood. But maybe there's someone else that's got an interest in these doin's."
"Ah!" says he. "And who might that be?"
"Mrs. Montgomery Smith," says I.
It was a chance shot, but it rung the bell. Doc goes as limp as a straw hat that's been hooked up after a dip in the bay, and his eyes took on that shifty look they had the first time I ever saw him.
"Why," says he, swallowin' hard, and doing his best to get back the stiff front he'd been puttin' up—"why, there's no such person."
"No?" says I. "How about the one that calls you Monty and runs you under the couch?"