“Ye wud, wud ye, ye little Judas,” Larry cried, shaking him. “I’ve a mind to kill ye this minute and set fire to your damned shack. Shall I kill him, sor?” he asked, twisting his head to wink at me.
I hesitated. “Perhaps you’d better,” I said. “No, wait a minute. Maybe he’ll be useful to us. We can come back and kill him later. Let him up, but hold on to him.”
Larry lifted the little man to his feet and he instantly fell on his knees again. “I vas only choking, sir. The clothes are for noddings. Only let me go, and go away. I’ll say nodding to no one that you came here.”
“All right,” I answered. “Let him go, Larry. But remember,” I added, “that if you ever breathe a word to any one of our having been here, one or both of us will come back here and kill you sure. We’ve murdered nine men already this year, and you’re not a man anyway.” Then we went out. The Jew’s face as we left was the touch of comedy we both needed.
We walked on down Seventh Avenue, planning the future as we went. I decided that it would be better for us to take separate rooms in separate boarding houses, somewhere down around 10th or 11th Streets, west of Sixth Avenue. It is, or was at that time, a forsaken backwater of a district, whither the flotsam and jetsam of spent lives seemed to drift, and where one seemed in New York but no longer of it. Thither drifted old maids, widows in straitened circumstances, drunkards slowly dying, remittance men of kindred vices, and the poorer element of Americans new to the city—often fresh from the farm or the small western town.
And late as it was, we had no difficulty in finding rooms. Larry hired himself a little hole on the ground floor on 11th Street, with a tiny window, no wider than his head, opening into an air-shaft. I found a place in 13th Street a couple of flights up and a little larger than his, but unostentatious enough. However, they were both fairly clean rooms, and both houses had telephones. We insisted upon that. Of course we had to pay in advance.
Larry gave his name as Tom O’Dowd and I gave mine as Michael Swift. Then, when we had stowed our bags away, we went out and walked a little, exchanged telephone numbers, and I arranged with Larry that he should make it a point to stay in the house from ten to twelve every morning and from six to midnight every night. The rest of the time he could do as he pleased, taking care to keep out of sight of possible police search. For I warned him that, in view of the high influences evidently back of the attempt to arrest us, they would not give up the search for us in a hurry.
We parted and went to bed without further incident that night. And that was a good thing, for if two men ever needed a rest we did. I was weak from loss of blood anyway, and I had had enough excitement that day to satisfy any one.
But the moment my head touched the pillow I began worrying about first Natalie and then Moore and it was long before I got to sleep. All that I had accomplished so far, it seemed, was to bring peril to two more people, instead of finding Margaret. But I was in a pretty low frame of mind that night.
The next morning, however, things looked very different. The breakfast they brought up to my rooms—for I explained that I had been knocked down in the street, through my newness to traffic—was better than I expected. And I was enjoying it thoroughly—until I opened the paper. Then the breakfast was forgotten. For the front page had a full account of the strange disappearance of Miss Van Cleef and the hue and cry that had been raised on account of it.