“Then why don’t you betray my presence? Why don’t you call your friends in to take me?”
“I’m not sure that I won’t; but if I don’t, it will be for their sakes, and not for yours. They could not take you without loss of life.”
“You’re right there,” he agreed, with a flash of his tigerish ferocity. “They couldn’t take me alive at all, and I reckon before I checked in a few of them would.”
CHAPTER XIV
BLACK MACQUEEN CASHES HIS CHECKS
It was part of his supreme audacity to trust her. While he was changing his dusty, travel-stained clothes for some that belonged to her brother she prepared a meal for him downstairs. A dozen times the impulse was on her to fly into the street and call out that Black MacQueen was in the house, but always she restrained herself. He was going to leave the country within a few hours. Better let him go without bloodshed.
He came down to his dinner fresh from a bath and a shave, wearing a new tweed suit, which fitted him a trifle loosely, but was not unbecoming to his trim, lithe figure. No commercial traveler at a familiar hotel could have been more jauntily and blithely at home.
“So you didn’t run away!” He grinned.