XI
THROUGH THE WALL-PAPER
"You've got to do it!" said Rosalie Le Grange; "no half-way business. I could show better reasons than I'm tellin'."
Blake paused in his slow walk beside her.
"What reasons?" he asked.
"Now listen to the man!" exclaimed Rosalie. "And ain't it man for you! Right off, first meeting, I told you enough to put me in jail and now you won't trust me!"
Blake seemed to see the logic of what she said.
"I have cause to trust you," he said, "and I hope you don't think that I am afraid of the personal danger. It's just that you're asking me to do something which—will, which people like me don't do."
"So anxious to be a gentleman that you forgit to be a man!" remarked Rosalie with asperity. "Now you listen to me. I've told you that she's held two materializing seances for Robert H. Norcross, haven't I? I've told you it is crooked materialization—even if there was such a thing as real cabinet spooks, which there ain't—because I found the ceiling trap an' the apparatus long ago. And if Mrs. Markham is playin' fake materializing with old Norcross as a dope, what does it come to? Obtainin' money, an' big money, under false pretenses! That's enough to put her behind the bars. So what risk do you take even if you are caught? She'll be more anxious than you to keep it away from the papers and the police. And Norcross! He'll break his collar-bone to shut it up!"