“Well, I may as well warn both of you that you’re watched, and if you try to make a get-away, you’ll be taken up––and it won’t be on suspicion, either. Play fair with Blaine, and he’ll be square with you, but don’t try to put anything over on him, or it’ll be the worse for you. It can’t be done.”
Morrow closed the door behind him, leaving the couple as they had been almost throughout the interview––the woman erect and stony of face, the man miserable and shaken, crouched dejectedly over the table. But scarcely had he descended the steps of the ramshackle little porch when the voice of Mame Pennold reached him, pitched in a shrill key of emotional exultation.
“Oh, Wally, Wally! Thank God you ain’t a snitcher! Thank God you didn’t tell!”
The voice ceased suddenly, as if a hand had been laid across her lips, and after a moment’s hesitation, Morrow swung off down the path, conscious of at least one pair of eyes watching him from behind the soiled curtains of the front room.
What had the woman meant? Pennold obviously had kept something back, but was it of sufficient importance to warrant his returning and forcing a confession? Whether it concerned Brunell or their nephew Charley mattered little, at the moment. He had achieved the object of his visit; he knew that Pennold himself had no connection with the Lawton forgeries, nor knowledge of them, and at the same time he had learned of Charley’s affiliation with Paddington. The couple back there in the little house could tell him scarcely more which would aid him in his investigation, but the dapper, viciously weak young stool-pigeon, if he could be located at once, might be made to disclose enough to place Paddington definitely within the grasp of the law.
Guy Morrow boarded a Sand Street car, and behind the sporting page of a newspaper he kept a sharp look-out for Lafferty’s saloon. He came to it at last––a dingy, down-at-heel resort, with much faded gilt-work over the door, and fly-specked posters of the latest social function of the district’s political club showing dimly behind its unwashed windows.
He rode a block beyond––then, alighting, turned back and entered the bar. It was deserted at that hour of the morning, save for a disconsolate-looking individual who leaned upon one ragged elbow, gazing mournfully into his empty whisky glass at the end of the narrow, varnished counter. The bartender emerged from a door leading into the back room, with a tall, empty glass in his hand, and Morrow asked for a beer. As he stood sipping it, he watched the bartender replenish the empty unwashed glass he had carried with a generous drink of doubtful looking absinthe and a squirt from a syphon.
“Bum drink on a cold morning,” he observed tentatively. “Have a whisky straight, on me?”
“I will that!” the bartender returned heartily. “This green-eyed fairy stuff ain’t for me; it’s for a dame in the back room––one of the regulars. She’s been hittin’ it up all the morning, but it don’t seem to affect her––funny, too, for she ain’t a boozer, as a general thing. Her guy’s gone back on her, an’ she’s sore. I’ll be with you in a minute.”