"I don't know. They all look alike to me. Oh, a monkey-faced guy, all tattooed—works up the line here a little. His wife owes me on a sewin'-machine. Told me he was down here."
"Seems to me I seen that feller," the bartender reflected. "Talks all chokey, don't he? Yes, he was in to-night, about half an hour ago. Made an argument becuz I wouldn't hang him up—if that's him."
I waited, shuffling with impatience, while Maclean bought cigars and slowly changed the subject. Then I burst out of doors so hurriedly that I collided with two harmless-looking individuals who were coming in.
"What shall we do now?" I demanded.
"Take a cigarette instead o' that Simsbury cabbage, an' cool off. If it's our guinea, he's huntin' free drinks all up the street. We'll run into him the next two or three places, somewhere."
In the next we drew a blank, but in the one after that we learned that our man had just left; and to my disgust, were forced to listen to a circumstantial account of his pleas and expedients in quest of liquor on credit. I was more certain than ever that it was Carucci himself, and hurried Mac on to the next saloon. To my surprise, he led the way to a table in the farthest corner and sat down with his back to the door.
"You look here, Laurie," he muttered, leaning across the table as the bartender went back for our order. "There's more doing in this than we're wise to. Did you see those two ginks that we ran into in the door back there?"
"No," said I, "what about them?"
"Well, that's what little Mac wants to know, the first thing he does. They're after the same dago, or else they're after us, you see? Every joint we've been in, those two float along after a couple of minutes, all cagey, not seein' anybody. An' they look like guineas themselves. There they come now."
He spoke without turning his head, and I looked past him at the two men entering the room. They were small, sallow, and respectable, one of them decidedly fat; and they looked to me like small Italian tradesmen in their Sunday or traveling clothes. They stood at the bar, talking between themselves with rapid speech and gesture, and paying not the smallest attention to us. They did not even glance around the room, so absorbed were they in their own conversation.