CHAPTER X
Calvin deposited his solitary dish upon the table to which she led him, and which was a small one for two persons only. She had not previously preëmpted it, he observed, for she transferred her own dishes from a nearby table where several other people were dining.
"See you some other time," she said, in parting, to another girl at that table.
"You've a friend with you," Calvin commented.
"Oh, no; we were just speaking."
"You could not have been there more than a moment," he objected.
"If wasn't; we'd just started to speak. Don't worry; not a soul'll know us. That's your chair; sit down or it'll look like I'm trying to make a pick up; then they'll throw us out."
She seated herself and placed a plate and a serving spoon on his side of the table and arranged her chicken pie and rolls and coffee before herself; but Calvin stubbornly stood. He had had no idea of involving himself in anything like this, when he had journeyed uptown to look over this environment of hers. Suppose Ellison or some one else from the state's attorney's office happened to come in, he thought; suppose Elmen saw him, or a newspaper reporter chanced upon him dining in an automat with the girl for whom Ketlar had shot his wife and who was the chief witness against the State!
"I came in here," said Calvin, "merely curiously, without any intention of dining."
"Then what'd you start to buy that pie for?" she questioned, casting him upon the defensive as she had done
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