“Nothing like it!” Morrow leaned forward impressively. “We don’t have to do any planting, Mame. It’s a good deal less than seven years since the Mortimer Chase’s silver plate lay in your cellar.”
“Silver plate––in our cellar!” echoed Mame in genuine amazement.
She stepped forward again, her shrewish chin out-thrust, but Walter Pennold raised his face, and at sight of it she stopped as if turned to stone.
“It’s no use!” he cried, brokenly. “They’ve got me, Mame!”
“Got you? They’ll never get you!” her startled scream rang out. “Wally, d’you know what the next term means? It’s a lifer, on any count! I don’t know what he means about any silver plate, but it’s a bluff! Don’t let him get your nerve!”
“Is it a bluff, Pennold?” asked Morrow, with dominant insistence.
The broken figure huddled in the chair shuddered uncontrollably.
“No, it ain’t,” he muttered. “I––I held out on you, Mame! I knew you wouldn’t risk it, so I didn’t say nothin’ to you about it, but the money was too easy to let get by. The old gang offered me five hundred bucks just to keep it ten days, and pass it on to Jennings. He came here with a rag-picker’s cart, you remember? You wondered what I was givin’ him, an’ I told you it was some rolls of old carpet I got from that place I was night watchman at, in Vandewater Street. I hid the stuff under the coal––”
“Shut up!” cried Mame, fiercely. “You don’t know 177 what you’re sayin’. Wally, hold your tongue for God’s sake! Where’s your spirit? Are you goin’ to break down now like a reformatory brat, you that had ’em all guessin’ for twenty years!”
The gaunt woman had recovered from the sudden shock of her husband’s unexpected revelation and now towered protectingly over his collapsed form, her palsied hands for once steady and firm upon his shoulders, while her keen eyes glittered shrewdly at the young operative confronting them.