“Well, then, if you won't be warned you'll just have to take me and risk it.”
And she slipped her arm into his and held up her lips for the kiss awaiting her.
CHAPTER XII — EXIT DUNKE
Dunke plowed back through the tunnel in a blind whirl of passion. Rage, chagrin, offended vanity, acute disappointment, all blended with a dull heartache to which he was a stranger. He was a dangerous man in a dangerous mood, and so Wolf Struve was likely to discover. But the convict was not an observant man. His loose upper lip lifted in the ugly sneer to which it was accustomed.
“Got onto you, didn't she?”
Dunke stuck his candle in a niche of the ragged granite wall, strode across to his former partner in crime, and took the man by the throat.
“I'll learn you to keep that vile tongue of yours still,” he said between set teeth, and shook the hapless man till he was black in the face.
Struve hung, sputtering and coughing, against the wall where he had been thrown. It was long before he could do more than gasp.
“What—what did you do—that for?” His furtive ratlike face looked venomous in its impotent anger. “I'll pay you for this—and don't you—forget it, Joe Dunke!”