CHAPTER TWELVE
"YOU can smoke here," announced Wilsnach, as he refilled his demi-tasse from the battered pewter coffee-pot with the ebony handle.
A faint tinge of pink crept up into Sadie Wimpel's powdered cheek. "I don't wantta smoke!"
Sadie spoke with apparent indifference, yet across the narrow white estuary of the restaurant-table she shot a glance of quick interrogation. Wilsnach, she felt, was trying her out. He was still a little uncertain about her being able to act like a lady.
"Why not?" he asked, recalling her earlier declaration that she had seen enough European duchesses engaged in that innocent pastime to swamp a ship. There were times, he had to acknowledge, when Sadie was still a bit of a mystery to him.
"I told yuh I was goin' to cut out the smokin' and the slang! And I'm goin' to cut them out for good!" For the second time the color showed a little deeper between the powdered ear-lobe and the ineradicable little runway of freckles. "I don't wantta do anything that'll make yuh ashamed of me. That's why!"
Wilsnach smiled at her solemnity. He could afford to be indulgent. He had vindicated his discovery. His exotic little side-street restaurant had yielded them up a dinner that was irreproachable. Sadie had eaten her way through that dinner with the open and honest appetite of a healthy boy. Wilsnach himself had dined with the delight of a truant who had found the balm of freedom edged with the zest of adventure.
"But I want you to be happy," he maintained, smiling at her from that hazy headland of content which is bastioned on the seas of ventral appeal. Trouble, he realized, could not house for long in that resilient young heart of hers. It was only two days since the tragic taking-off of Shindler, but shocked as she may have been by that occurrence, she now seemed intent on forgetting it. As she sat smiling across the table at him she could even surrender her hand to his, with a child-like little gulp of contentment.
"Well, I'm so happy when I see yuh coppin' anything about me to like, that I'd go without eatin', if yuh said so!" Here Sadie once more sighed contentedly. "And I sure like my eats!"
Their hands clasped midway across the narrow table.
"I like everything about you!" he said with sudden fervor. And he knew it was true.
"Yuh see I've canned that junk yuh kicked about," she announced, as she stared hungrily down at her now ringless fingers. Yet she looked up at him again, even more hungrily. "Yuh ain't ashamed of me?" she implored.
"You're wonderful!" he averred.
Her eyes deepened and darkened. She sighed happily. Then her linked fingers at the table-center closed with sudden passion about his hand. "Hully gee, but I love yuh!" she cried out with a tremulous little choke in her voice. "I love yuh so much that it hurts!"
"You'll never be sorry for it!" was Wilsnach's equally tremulous reply.
"I know I won't. But sometimes I think yuh will!"
"Try me!"
"Sometimes," went on the woman with whom, he knew, life had dealt so harshly, "sometimes I wish we could have known each other when I was as young and baby-eyed as those girls that go up and down Fift' Avenue, ev'ry afternoon! Why couldn't this have come to me before I got mixed up with all those things I can't get away from?"
Wilsnach felt the raven wing of tragedy that fluttered over them, and he did his best to brush it away. "Then I would never have known you! I wouldn't have been fit to sit beside you! And the dead past has buried its dead, and we're not going to dig it up. We've got a whole lifetime to look forward to!"
"A whole lifetime!" she echoed.
"And once we've helped Kestner clear up this Keudell case we'll be free to start over."
He thought, for a moment, that the sudden release of his hand was due to her resentment at the intrusion of those sterner realities which they had for the moment evaded. But he saw that it was actually due to the fact that their funereal waiter was returning to the table. And from the first Sadie had most heartily disliked that waiter.
They sat in silence until the funereal figure once more took its laggard departure. Then the estuary was again bridged by its linked warmth of hand meeting hand.
"Will yuh always love me?" Saide wistfully asked.
Wilsnach did not answer that question. He did not answer it because at the moment his eye was fixed on yet another figure that stepped quietly over to their table even as he watched.
"Are you Mr. Wilsnach?" this stranger inquired.
"Why?" asked Wilsnach.
"There's a man wants you at the phone."
"What man?"
"He called himself Kestner, I think."
It was the school-bell sounding accusingly on the ears of the truant. Wilsnach looked at Sadie Wimpel. Their hour was over.
The heavy-browed intruder seemed quite indifferent to their emotions. "You'll find the telephone on the second floor," he said as he moved indifferently away.
Wilsnach got up from his chair. "I'll be back in a minute," he announced.
"Don't be long," she murmured, as her eye still followed him. Then she sat back watching the man with the proprietary air as he directed Wilsnach to the stairway that led above. Then she fell to wondering what the meaning of Kestner's sudden call would be.
She was still pondering this when the man with the proprietary air stepped back to her table side. He moved with more haste than before. But his aspect was one of bored preoccupation.
"Mr. Wilsnach is waiting for you outside," he explained. He even languidly and impersonally assisted her in gathering up her belongings.
"Why didn't Mr. Wilsnach come for me?" she demanded. If a party took you out to dinner, she had been taught, it was a party's job to see that you didn't have to cruise out of a slum-joint without an escort.
"He said he had to find a taxicab. I guess maybe he's in a hurry."
Of course he would be in a hurry, Sadie remembered, with a call like that from Kestner. And nothing could shake her faith in the rock of Wilsnach's gentility. So she quickened her steps and caught up her skirts as she mounted to the sidewalk. There, to her relief, she caught sight of the waiting taxicab.
She could even see Wilsnach's hand swing the door open for her. She knew, as she stepped lightly up into the hooded darkness of the cab, that he was moving over on the seat to make room for her. At the same moment, however, she became conscious of the fact that a second man was crowding in through the narrow door behind her.
She turned to Wilsnach with a question on her lips. She realized, as she did so, that the taxicab was already well under way. But her second discovery quite obliterated her earlier one. As she stared through the gloom she found that the man who sat so close beside her was not Wilsnach.
She twisted quickly about and saw that the second man who had followed her into the cab was equally unknown to her. It was a moment or two before the significance of the situation actually struck home. Then followed a reaction that was as natural as it was inevitable. She wasted no further time on doubts. She had for too many months been the center of contending forces, buffeted by the tides of intrigue, conspired against by the enemies of evil. She started to her feet and shouted aloud with all the strength of her lusty young lungs.
But that call of alarm was not long-lived. She found herself jerked bodily back into the cab-seat and a massive hand at the same time placed over her mouth. It cupped itself artfully over her chin, with a gigantic thumb and forefinger squeezing tight on her nostrils until the very breath of life was shut off from her body. She felt herself wedged closely in between the two bodies. They held her like the horns of a vise, held her until all movement became impossible.
She tried to writhe and twist away from the great hand that was shutting off her breath. But this was impossible. Reverting to feral ways, she tried to fight with nail and tooth. But this was equally useless. She was without strength. The ache for air caused her to collapse. Then, and then only, the gross thumb and forefinger over her nose relaxed their pressure a little and permitted her to breathe again.
The man who had thrown an arm about her, she saw, was huge of stature. He was massive and thick-shouldered, almost giant-like in size. And about the entire proceeding he had remained maddeningly self-contained.
"This dame's sure to be heeled," he said to the smaller man on her right. "You frisk her when I hold her down!"
Again her revolt against indignity was prompt and instinctive. She felt the odious hand padding impersonally about her body, in search for a possible weapon. Those bruskly interrogative fingers seemed to her as beastial as the slathering of a snake about her helpless limbs. And she fought against them with all the strength that was left to her.
The big man beside her tightened his grip. "Quit that!" he warned her, "or you'll quit breathing!"
And again the great hand cupped over her face and shut off her breath. And again she was compelled to subside.
"Nothin' doin'" grunted the smaller man when the exploration was completed. He sat back in the seat again, linking his arm dexterously through the girl's so that any further movement of her hand was impossible. Then the big man on her left did the same. She felt at least grateful for being able to breathe again. But she was held as tightly between the two bodies on each side of her as though she had been strapped in a straight-jacket. She had no clear knowledge of where the hurrying taxicab was threading its way. She knew that they had turned, and turned again. The lights seemed to be fewer, and she could see they were now following streets that were both quiet and unkempt. And she concluded that for the time at least all resistance was useless.
She warned herself to be calm and keep her wits about her. It was no longer the fleeting physical terror at being physically overpowered that possessed her. It was more a great and all-consuming indignation at the treatment to which she had been subjected. She could know sustained fear no more than could the homeless feline that has adventured through the thousand nocturnal vicissitudes of all street-life. It took some bunch of trouble to give her cold feet. Her own life for the last few years, as she had so recently told Wilsnach, stood too checkered to leave room for such a chill. But that was the only medal, she explained, that her years of outlawry had hung on her. It had put her out of the house-pet class. Yet she was startled and upset and disturbed in soul by the sudden thought of her helplessness. They had got her head in chancery. But even more disquieting to her was the thought that they had tricked her so easily, that they had put one over on her, by a dodge that was as old as the dip-jostler's.
"Going to keep quiet now?" the big man at her side was inquiring.
Sadie did not even deign to answer that question. She was wondering what form her chance would take when it came. For chances always come, in some shape or other, and if not at one moment, then at another. She could not afford to give up her faith in that.
"Sure she's goin' to keep quiet," was the grim response of the man on the other side of her. His face advanced toward her in the darkness, like the head of a fighting-cock. "For if she can't do it her way, she'll do it ours!"
Sadie, as the car rattled on, pounding over car-tracks and swerving about corners, decided to do it in her own way. She preferred the privilege of breathing. But she decided, in her secret soul of souls, that if it came to a show-down she could do up that smaller man, even though she had to eat his ears off. She could make the runt take the mat. She was sure of it. And the only thing that held her back was the memory of the second man with a hand like a ham. He was a different proposition, that human derrick.
It was this second man who suddenly shouted aloud to the driver as their car took still another corner on the run. They slowed down and stopped. The smaller man on Sadie's right stepped out, closing the door behind him. Sadie could see him talking in low tones to the driver. What passed between them she could not tell. But her heart went down a little at the resultant discovery that this licensed chauffeur was a conscious factor in the movement. And the big man on her left, with his ever-menacing big hand close to her face, was holding her securely down in the seat.
It was as the smaller man climbed back in the car that Sadie's hopes suddenly rose. Under a street lamp not twenty paces away she saw the light flash on the metal buttons of a patrolman's uniform. A glimpse of that uniform fortified her with the memory that she was now on the side of the Law—that she and the approaching officer were colleagues in a common sense. She squinted thoughtfully at the huge paw poised so close to her face. She took a deep breath, like a diver about to make his plunge. Then with all the strength of her sturdy young lungs she shrilled out the one pregnant and disturbing word of "Help!"
It was a scream that could not be altogether stifled. Even a feather mattress could not have completely muffled it. But the poised hand came down on it, like a pianist's soft-pedal on a concerto's loudest chord.
The smaller man swore softly as he dodged up into his seat. The cry, it is true, could not be repeated, for the great engulfing paw had closed over the girl's face and promptly prohibited the inhalation of her next breath. The human derrick, above the whispered vitriolic blasphemies of the smaller man, shouted wrathfully to the driver to get his car under way. But before it could even gather speed the blue-coat was out beside the running-board. Sadie did not even object to having her breath cut off, for in another second the officer himself had swung open the cab-door. And that, she knew, meant rescue.
"What's doin' in here?" he demanded. Then the belligerency went out of his face, for the smaller man had leaned forward into the light. Yet nothing, so far as Sadie could see, passed between them.
"Hello, that you, Spike?" was the officer's milder-spoken inquiry. "Whatcha got there, anyway?"
"It's all right, Tim! She's only lit and noisy!"
"Who is?"
"It's Blink Hogan's skirt. We had to dig her out o' Cumiskey's hop-joint!"
"Soused?"
"To the gills! Says she's a she-hyena and been tryin' to prove it!"
"Whatcha doin' with her?" was the officer's more indifferent-noted inquiry. For Sadie, with her breath cut off, was unable orally to contradict this gross misstatement. So she did her best to kick the glass out of the cab-front. But the big man was too much for her.
"We gave Blink our promise to get her home," was the smaller man's weary retort. "But if you can do it any easier, I wish t'ell you'd take her over."
The officer now stood on the curb. He was swinging his night-stick.
"Not for mine!" he finally announced.
It was not until the cab was under way, and well under way, that Sadie was really permitted to breathe again. They were traveling faster now, rocking along streets that were still unknown to her. She had, in fact, long since lost all sense of time and direction. Even their movements of the passing moment became more or less indistinct to her. She was vaguely conscious of the fact that they had pulled up before a forbidding-looking house and the two men were half-lifting her down out of the cab. The street, as she later recalled it, seemed deserted. But her companions gave her little time for observation. They walked, one on each side of her, holding her up by the arm-pits. The cab moved on, she remembered, as they hurried her in toward the house-door, which swung open with a signal, seeming to suck them in like a bivalve. Then the double-doors closed behind her, and the sound of their closing seemed like the thud of a dead- fall, like the double snap of a trap.
They crossed a hallway and went stumblingly up a stairway, through unbroken darkness. They went three abreast, the men feeling their way as they mounted. At the top of the stairs, after taking a turn, the smaller man stopped and pushed a wall-button. This flooded the upper hallway with light. Then they moved on to a closed door. This the bigger man opened with his left hand.
They stepped into a room papered with sulphur-colored wall-paper. It was not large, and its furniture was both mean and meager. From this room, however, a door opened into a lighted room at the rear.
The smaller man stepped promptly in through this second door, leaving the girl still firmly held by his larger companion.
Sadie could hear a broken hum of voices, one more guttural than the others. It was the guttural voice, emerging louder and more authoritative than its rivals, which finally made itself heard.
"Then bring her in here!" this voice commanded.
Sadie, as she heard it, found the situation less mysterious but none the less menacing. For it was Keudell himself who had spoken. And the next moment she was being led into his presence.
Sadie blinked a little at the strong light with which she found herself suddenly confronted. But she blinked even more at the figures which she saw ranged before her. They made her think of a row of magistrates set up to intimidate a prisoner. For behind the long green-baize table which stood almost at the center of the room sat four men in four high-backed chairs.
Three of them she recognized at a glance. The one directly behind the reflecting library lamp that stared at her like a headlight, was Keudell himself. The next man to him was Breitman, alias Wallaby Sam. And next to Breitman sat Andelman, the same suave Andelman who had posed as the ordnance officer from the Department at Washington. The fourth man, who sat on Keudell's left, she could not for a moment place. Then she remembered the Secret Service photograph which Kestner had once handed out to her and Wilsnach for inspection. It was Heinold, the Austrian who had stolen the gun plans from the Watervliet works and handed them on to Dorgan.
That quartette's silent contemplation of her, she realized, was meant to be inquisitional. She felt, even against her will, like a prisoner brought to the dock. There was something disturbing, for a moment, in that judicial array. It brought to her mind the impression that she was a cell-inmate suddenly confronted by her accusers. Yet she was not altogether afraid of them. The whole thing, she tried to tell herself, had been stage-managed for the sole purpose of terrorizing her. Even the high-backed chairs and the formidable-looking table of green-baize did not quite succeed in giving them the dignity of a judicatory tribunal. For taking them all in all, she knew, they were as unsavory a quartette of intrigants and agents provocateur as ever skulked like rats through the sub-cellars of a nation's defenses. And the knowledge that she was a servant of that nation kept her courage up.
But Sadie had little more time to think of this, for Keudell had already given a curt command to Heinold.
"Lock that door!" he barked out.
As Heinold crossed to the door and locked it Keudell turned back to the still standing girl.
"Sit down!" he commanded.
She advanced a step or two to the worn leather chair, which had apparently been carefully placed for her, and sank languidly into it. This left her even more in the full glare of the light from the reflector of the green-topped reading-lamp on the table.
"Yuh might switch that electric," she mildly suggested.
"Why?" demanded Keudell.
Sadie sat intently regarding him. They watched each other warily, like boxers pondering the problem of how the first blow should strike. Then the girl's lip curled a little with scorn. But otherwise she remained outwardly unmoved.
"It rather annoys me," she finally replied.
Keudell swept her with a glacial eye. "It suits me as it is," was his reply. "And you will have, madame, worse things than that to annoy you before you have finished with us!"
"Ain't he the big man!" murmured Sadie, settling back in her chair.
Her nonchalance seemed for a moment to nonplus Keudell, to leave him nothing against which to storm. Then he cleared himself again for action.
"You will tell us," he suddenly said, and his voice gave the sense of thundering even while it remained moderate in volume, "you will tell us what you know about Abraham Shindler."
Sadie continued to study him with a perplexed yet casual eye.
"What's the guy's name?" she inquired.
"Shindler, I said!" repeated Keudell. But the thunder-bolt, repeated, was without its sense of shock. Sadie Wimpel merely shook her head.
"Yuh're barkin' up the wrong tree. That gink ain't on my callin' list!"
Keudell, with his molars clamped together, sat regarding her. The thought that he had made a bad beginning did not tend to soften his manner. "What's your name?" he suddenly shot out at her.
Sadie smiled. "What difference does it make?" she languidly inquired.
"Were you not known in Monte Carlo as Cherry Dreiser?" asked Andelman.
"Maybe!" was Sadie's reply.
"And two years ago last April," continued Keudell, "you were in Odessa. What was your business there?"
"I wasn't murderin' any Jewish map-thief!" she announced as she met Keudell's steely stare. The latter's face did not actually change in expression. But there was a ponderable lapse of time before he put his next question.
"Why did you leave Budapest exactly two years ago?"
"Did I?" parried Sadie.
"You did!"
"And yuh're dead sure of it?"
"I am!"
"Then yuh're probably dead sure of the reason why!"
It was Wallaby Sam who spoke next. His voice was shaking a little, and for the first time in his life he seemed to have parted from his rubicund suavity. He was like a robin with a house-cat too close to its fledglings.
"Look here, my girl, we're not here for the fun of all this. You know who we are, don't you?"
Sadie continued to eye them with languid scorn. "I know the whole bunch!"
"And do you imagine we're going to put up with much of this monkey-work?"
"I ain't interested in what yuh're goin' to put up with!"
"But you're here, and you're going to stay here until you answer certain questions."
"And then what?" inquired Sadie.
It was Keudell who spoke next. "You do not intend to talk, perhaps?" he demanded.
"Ain't I talkin'?" inquired Sadie.
Keudell leaned forward across the green-baize table-top, staring at her. For a moment he stared at her almost abstractedly, as though pondering the mystery of human speech and the inviolability of the human will. He stood arrested by the consciousness that behind the unfurrowed frontal-bone of this chit of a girl facing him were certain facts to which he sought access, certain facts which he must possess. They were there in the small vault of her skull, there clear and plain, there as definitely and indisputably as a tradesman's greenbacks lie in a safe-drawer. Yet between that frontal-bone and a safe-door there was a perilous difference. The heavier chamber of steel could be shattered and ravished. But with the crushing of that smaller chamber of bone and tissue its treasure went with it.
It was that which frustrated him, as it must frustrate all men who seek to live by force alone. Between him and those most desired of facts stood nothing more than a fraction of an inch of sutured calcium salts which one blow could shatter. Yet they remained inaccessible, impervious to his power.
"You think, madame, you may perhaps beat us at this game?" he finally suggested. An ominous note of quietness had come into his voice. It was in his suavest moods, she remembered, that he was most to be feared.
"What game?" temporized Sadie.
"The game, madame, that is going to end before you get out of this house!"
Time, Sadie felt, was an asset to her. She no longer stood alone. She was part of a complex mechanism which her absence would disturb, as a slipped cog disrupts a machine. Already, she felt, the word had gone out and the search was under way. So her first duty now was to fence for time.
"Then what's the use o' talkin' about it?" was her nonchalant retort to Keudell's threat.
"But you are going to talk about it!"
"Am I?"
"You are going to say, first, where this man Kestner is, and where the papers you stole are, and then what became of the blue-prints you tricked out of Dorgan. And you are going to say it before you see God's sunshine again!"
Sadie's passivity suddenly dropped from her. Fixed as may have been her purpose, her mind, in the final analysis, was still an untutored one. And anger possessed her.
"Say, yuh can't pull that movie stuff on me!" she cried back at him. "I'm not the goat in this deal. And what's more, yuh guys can't throw a scare into me, either! Yuh may as well get wise to that! Get it—and get it good! This is the third time yuh've tried to put over the rough-neck work—and yuh know how far it got yuh before and how far it's goin' to get yuh this time!"
Keudell seemed to relish her opposition. Resistance was what he wanted. It supplied him with a bone on which to set his teeth. He stood up in his place, almost exultantly, and leaned across the table menacing her with an accusatory forefinger.
"This, madame, will be the fourth time. And this time it will get us somewhere. It will—"
He stopped, interrupted by a sudden knock on the door. He motioned, still standing, for Heinold to answer that knock.
The entire tribunal waited, anxious-eyed, as the key was turned and the door opened. But most anxious of all waited Sadie, for all the indifferent glance with which she apparently regarded her suede shoe-tips. For she remembered that she was still the part of a machine.
It was the huge-bodied man who had held her in the taxicab. He came in thoughtfully, ignoring her where she sat. But she watched him as he crossed the room and leaned over the green-baize table toward Keudell.
"We've got him this time!" he quietly announced.
"Which one?"
"Wilsnach!"
Keudell, with slightly incredulous eyes, sank slowly back into his chair. "Where is he?"
Sadie, for the moment, was quite forgotten.
"I left Spike and Otto bringing him in from the cab."
"Do you mean he is hurt, perhaps?"
The big man shrugged a shoulder. "Of course he got noisy when he saw he was nipped. They always do. So we had to shut him up."
"Can he talk?"
"He could talk all right if he wanted to."
"But will he talk?" was Keudell's quick inquiry.
"We haven't tried."
It was Wallaby Sam, with his rosily bald head slightly inclined, who spoke next. "Then hadn't we better get him up here?"
Keudell made a gesture of impatience.
"We don't want him up here until this woman has said what she's going to say." Sadie Wimpel already seemed a mere incident in his activities. He had bigger fish to fry. "Tell Spike and Otto to take him down-stairs and take his boots off. Give him five minutes to write out what we want to know. If he refuses, and fails to change his mind in that time, light the gas-tube and get busy with it."
"And if he still refuses?"
"You can cook his feet off, for all I care!"
The big man turned coolly away. "I'll cook 'em all right!" he determinedly announced, as he crossed the room and passed out through the door.
The quietness of that room was ominous. The man called Heinold was waiting to relock the door before returning to his seat. He even had his hand on the knob before anything happened to interrupt that ominous lull. Yet it was not so much an interruption as an eruption.
The crater of it was the worn leather chair in which Sadie Wimpel sat. It seemed less a reasoned and pre-determined movement than a blind and frenzied explosion of activity. Yet behind that tumult, mad as it seemed, was some shadow of thought, some forlorn attempt at strategy.
For Sadie, in her revolt against quiescence, had not altogether lost her head. When she struck, she struck in the only way possible to her.
She dived so quickly for the green-baize table that the impact of her body sent it crowding over against the breasts of the three men seated behind it, before they could rise to their feet. This, for a few seconds, preoccupied them with purely defensive movements. Yet before those three men could actually comprehend the meaning of her advance she had caught and snatched away the electric-light standard, tearing the cloth-covered wires from their socket as she darted back across the room.
The result of this maneuver was to plunge the place into total darkness. She could hear the sound of overturned chairs and the quick shouts to Heinold to guard the door. But she was close beside the pale-eyed Austrian before he could recover from his first surprise. He threw out his arms to bar her way, and clutched at her when she brushed against him. But the lacquered brass lamp-standard was already poised, and at the right moment she brought it down with all her force.
She could hear his curse of anger as he fell back before that onslaught, for her blow had not fallen true. But he no longer occupied her thoughts. Her one passion was to get through the door, against which she had fallen bodily. She heard, even before she had it open, quick steps stumbling and advancing about her in the darkness. But she had found the knob and swung through to the outer room without any of the outstretched hands reaching her. A revolver barked out, somewhere behind her, before she could swing the door shut again. But the bullet missed her, and she was now well ahead of her pursuers. She even had time to swing shut the hall door as she passed through it. Another ten steps took her to the head of the stairway. The exultation of battle was in her veins by this time, and she went down the carpeted treads like a reindeer down a rock-side.
At the bottom she saw a shadow looming up before her. But she was unable to stop. She saw this shadow assume the form of a cross, and even as she felt her hurtling body engulfed in a pair of massive arms, she knew, sickeningly, that it was the same huge-bodied man who had held her down in the taxicab once more making her a prisoner. Above the shock of that sudden arrest and the deadening pressure of the constricting arms about her she could hear the sharp calls and shouts from above and then the huskily reassuring words of her captor. "It's all right! I've got her!"
Keudell and Andelman were already down the stairs and close behind her. Wallaby Sam, leaning over the banister, shouted down an order in German, an order which she could not quite understand. But the others seemed to disregard him.
"What'll I do with her?" the big man was calmly if a little breathlessly inquiring of Keudell.
The light was too dim for Sadie to see his face. But his voice was once more menacing in its quietness. "You will tie her up," he commanded. "Then you will lock her—in the room at the back. You will be so good as to tie her securely, quite securely. For we shall have need of her, later on. She is a she-cat, my friend, it will not be unpleasant to tame!"
"I'll tie her all right!" announced the wide-shouldered man as he lifted her clear of her feet. And once more Sadie knew that all struggle was useless.