Jard nodded at Vane. “If Liza had been born a man she’d of been dead quite a spell now,” he said.
“But I guess there’d been a few other funerals about the same time as mine,” said Miss Hassock, smiling grimly.
“Bootleggers?—moonshiners?” queried Vane.
This, he felt, explained the sentinels and the signals.
“You said it that time, Mr. Vane—and it’s a treat to hear a man with grit enough in his crop to say it out loud, even if he is only askin’,” returned Liza. “Bootleggers and moonshiners is right. The Danglers take the lead in every low devilment.”
“Liza’s maybe right an’ maybe wrong,” said Jard. “I ain’t sayin’ anythin’ about it, whatever I’m thinkin’; an’ I hope you won’t, neither—not while you live in Moosehead House, anyhow. Liza’s mighty free with her mean names, talkin’ about cowards an’ the like—but—well, her an’ my property is all right here—this hotel an’ the land an’ the barns. So we got to stop right here, an’ I’d sooner stop here alive than dead. I can’t afford to be so gosh darned brave—like Liza.”
The fire went out of the big woman’s eyes and the derision left her lips. She strode over to her brother, stooped and laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Please forgive me, Jard,” she said. “You are right and I am all wrong.”
Steve Dangler had not come to Forkville that morning for the sole purpose of delivering old Luke’s defiant message to old Dave. He had been instructed to hunt out and look over and size up the stranger who was rigged out like a sport, and who had passed him and yet escaped him the night before. There was no doubt in either Steve’s or old Luke’s mind that this person was a police officer or law officer spying around on behalf of the nearest Prohibition Enforcement Inspector. But even so, it would be wise to make sure, and to size him up and get a line on his character and methods, before deciding on the safest and surest way of dealing with him. To date, the usual methods of lulling official suspicion, combined with the long-established terror of the Dangler name, had suffered to keep inviolate the secret activities of Goose Creek.
When Steve reached the front door of Moosehead House, Jard Hassock was gossiping at the village smithy, Miss Hassock was in the kitchen and Robert Vane was up in his room writing a letter to a friend whose father owned a town house in New York, a country home on Long Island and a winter place in Florida. He was writing to the Florida address. Steve opened the hotel door, entered, glanced into the empty office on the right, and the empty “settin’-room” on the left, cocked his ear for sounds of Miss Hassock, whom he feared, then ascended the stairs swiftly and silently. After looking into three unoccupied bedrooms, he halted and struck a casual attitude on Vane’s threshold.