“I know this much. Father took your hat by mistake from the club. You bought a brown one half an hour later. You used Father’s to manufacture evidence against him. If it isn’t true that he is your prisoner how does it come that you have your gray hat again? You must have taken it from him.”
He laughed uneasily. She had guessed the exact truth.
“In Arizona there are about forty thousand gray hats like this. Do you figure you can identify this one, Miss Cullison? And suppose your fairy tale of the Jack of Hearts is true, couldn’t I have swapped hats again while he lay there unconscious?”
She brushed his explanation aside with a woman’s superb indifference to logic.
“You can talk of course. I don’t care. It is all lies—lies. You have kidnapped Father and are holding him somewhere. Don’t you dare to hurt him. If you should—Oh, if you should—you will wish you had never been born.” The fierceness of her passion beat upon him like sudden summer hail.
He laughed slowly, well pleased. A lazy smoldering admiration shone in his half shuttered eyes.
“So you’re going to take it out of me, are you?”
A creature of moods, there came over her now a swift change. Every feature of her, the tense pose, the manner of defiant courage, softened indescribably. She was no longer an enemy bent on his destruction but a girl pleading for the father she loved.
“Why do you do it? You are a man. You want to fight fair. Tell me he is well. Tell me you will set him free.”
He forgot for the moment that he was a man with the toils of the law closing upon him, forgot that his success and even his liberty were at stake. He saw only a girl with the hunger of love in her wistful eyes, and knew that it lay in his power to bring back the laughter and the light into them.