CHAPTER SIX
IT was ten minutes later that Sadie Wimpel seated herself in her reptiliously embroidered palm-reading parlor. Leaning back in her chair of state, she languidly tapped a cork-tipped cigarette on her plaster-of-Paris property-skull. As she did so Wilsnach, seated on the other side of the table, turned over and over the heavy manila envelope which she had quietly yet triumphantly handed to him. Then he tore it open.
He leaned forward over the papers with a quite audible gasp of bewilderment, which Sadie made it a point to ignore, being at the moment studiously engaged in blowing a smoke-ring in between the slightly parted curtains of her materializing cabinet.
Then Wilsnach, rounding the table, came and stared down at the pert young face so thickly covered with rice-powder.
"Sadie," he announced, a little tremulously, "you've got 'em!"
"Huh?" inquired the languid-eyed Sadie, disconsolately looking into a chocalate box which she only too well knew to be empty.
"Sadie, you're simply wonderful!" declared Wilsnach, as he stooped down and caught her by the shoulders.
"Do anything, Willsie, but tamp the bull-con into a trustin' heart!" mocked the girl. But a solemn look came into her eyes as she stood up beside her colleague and his hand slipped happily about her shoulder.
"You are a wonder, Sadie," repeated Wilsnach, with a preoccupied and brotherly pat, as he stared down at the manila envelope. "Why, you've saved the War Office stuff here that's worth millions to them!"
The vague look of hunger that had crept into Sadie's eyes slowly crept out of them again.
"Have I?" she listlessly asked. For he had already turned away and was once more bent over the papers on the table.
"But how did you do it?"
Sadie, watching him appraisingly out of the corner of her eye, blew another smoke-ring. Then, with a shrug, she sat back in her chair.
"The same as I've done any other Service work," she announced, wondering if it was merely an empty stomach that left all the world so suddenly empty.
"But how?"
Sadie briefly but picturesquely retailed to him the happenings of the afternoon. Wilsnach, when she had finished, sat for a luxurious minute or two staring at her in silent approval. Then his gaze went still again to the manila envelope which he now held in his hand.
He sat there, in troubled thought, as Sadie herself went to the window, opened the slats of the heavy colonial shutter and stared out into the gathering darkness of the side-street.
"And it's rainin' pitch-forks!" she declared. Wilsnach looked up at her sharply as she crossed to the hall-door and opened it.
"Zuleika," she called out, "yuh gotta can that turban outfit and get into a rain-coat! Then beat it over to Broadway and loor a taxi back to this cave o' hunger!"
Wilsnach was on his feet by this time.
"What do you want with a taxi?" he demanded.
Sadie eyed him with mild disfavor.
"I'm goin' to feed!" was her ultimatum. "And seein' I ain't et for over seven hours, I'm goin' to feed in a joint where they don't have to send out for the fizz!"
"You can't do it, Sadie," Wilsnach calmly declared. He stowed the carefully folded charts down in his inner pocket and stood studying the empty manila enevelope.
"Why can't I? Ain't I done enough roof-runnin' to git an honest appetite?"
"You've done enough to get a life-medal from Daniels himself," he admitted. "But don't you see what's still ahead of us?"
"I'd like to see about a yard of steak ahead o' me!"
"We've only been through the first act of this play, and the second might begin any time now. And we're not ready for it. Don't you suppose that man Dorgan is going to come back here as soon as he imagines it's safe? How are you going to face him without his papers?"
But Sadie was not interested in papers.
"For the love o' Mike, ain't yuh goin' to gimme a chance to eat between now and Christmas?"
"You can eat later, Sadie, but just now we are acting for the Service, and to the Service everything must bow."
"Yuh got them papers, and Keudell didn't—ain't that enough?"
"These are not the only papers Keudell was after. Either that man or one of his agents planted at Watervliet got our new coast-gun plans, our new seventeen-inch gun with the new Winton automatic breech-lock." Wilsnach looked down at his watch. "And in ten minutes it's up to me to be inside Keudell's house and going through it from cellar to attic."
"And just where'll Keudell be?" Sadie inquired.
"If Dorgan got away I rather imagine he'll be shadowing Dorgan."
Sadie suddenly backed away.
"And s'posin' that pink-eyed wop comes down here to raise a holler?" demanded the girl.
"Nothing could be more satisfactory," was the other's answer.
"And what am I goin' to do if that wire-haired Irish terrier beats it back here and finds out I've double-crossed him? What'm I goin' to tell him about them papers?"
"Those papers," corrected Wilsnach.
"Those papers," dutifully repeated the girl.
"You're going to give them back to him."
"While yuh still have 'em?" mocked Sadie. "Hypnotizin' him wit' a couple o' passes, I s'pose, so he'll sit down and eat outta me hand?"
Their eyes met.
"Sadie, I believe you could hypnotize that man Dorgan!"
"I'd have a fine chanct, wouldn't I, wit' his envelope tore open and his blue-prints missin'?"
"We'll get another envelope and we'll make it look like one full of blue-prints," explained Wilsnach.
"And where'll yuh get it?"
"Where most envelopes come from—a stationery store. And I'll see if Kestner himself can't drop in with it, in ten or fifteen minutes, on his way to help me out up at the Keudell house. But before I forget. it, I want my revolver."
She crossed the room to the black-draped table, opened her hand-bag and gave Wilsnach the weapon.
"And what t'ell am I goin' to do if that gink starts rough-housin' round here?"
"He may never even come here. But I hope he does!"
"Then what's the matter wit' yuh stayin' right here and gatherin' in both Dorgan and Keudell yourself?"
"I don't want Dorgan. He's the sick oyster that's had the pearl taken out of him. And I don't want Keudell until I can get him right. And I can't waste another minute arguing about it. If Dorgan comes before I can get back you'll have to handle him alone!"
Sadie watched him as he stepped hurriedly toward the door.
"Hold on a minute!" she commanded, for she hated the thought of his leaving her.
"I can't!" was Wilsnach's retort as he flung open the door and made for the street.
Sadie stood looking after him for a meditative moment or two. She shut her lips tight, to put a stop to their trembling. Then she studiously and dejectedly scratched the point of her tip-tilted nose. Then she stared slowly about her mysteriously lighted reception-room, from the reptiliously-adorned screen to the black-draped materializing cabinet. Then she crossed to the table and stood between her framed signs of the Zodiac and the leering white skull on its velvet pad. She stood peering down at the languid-bodied goldfish circling idly about their iridescent glass bowl, moodily pondering the question as to whether or not goldfish were good to eat.
Then she looked up suddenly at the sound of angry voices, the reproving throaty tones of the negress Zuleika and the heavier challenging notes of the intruder who was not to be kept back.
Then she rounded the table and stood between it and the cabinet curtains, watching the door.
"It's that wire-haired terrier come back!" she lugubriously announced, as she took a deep breath and waited for the door to open.
A moment after the door had opened Sadie Wimpel saw that it was indeed Dorgan. But it was a figure much different to the Dorgan who had stepped into her reception-room a few hours earlier in the day. About him, however, still clung a forlorn air of bravado, seeming to announce him as a spirit not easily cowed.
Sadie, as she stood staring at him, decided that much of that woebegone buoyancy was based on the courage which is paid for over a mahogany bar. For Dorgan's figure was not an inspiriting one. Over one eye and surrounding his entire head was a huge white bandage, startlingly suggestive of Zuleika's pontifical turban. A diminutive mountain-ridge of court-plaster adhered to his lower lip, and along the point of his right jaw-bone ran still another spur of plaster, to say nothing of divers abrasions about the collarless and bull-like neck. In several places, too, his clothing was plainly torn.
"So they did things to yuh, too!" she announced, as he stood returning her stare of inspection.
Sadie's appreciation of character was quick and instinctive. She knew that Dorgan was no coward, yet she also knew that in some undefined way she was cleverer than this man with the belligerent square jaw and the wiry black hair. She recalled what Wilsnach had already told her about Dorgan being at one time a prize-fighter. She herself, in the days which she kept behind the locked door of her memory, had had occasion to study a prize-ring professional at close range, and her contempt for that gentry was open and unqualified. It left her less afraid of Dorgan. Life's final victories, Sadie had long since learned, were not won by fists.
So as she stared with quiet appraisal at the thick-muscled arms, the significant "mushroom" ear showing below the tilted head-bandage, and the short flat nose shadowing the elongated potato-lip which so unequivocally announced Dorgan's ancestry, she decided that he was not altogether an agreeable type to "double-cross." The mere fact that he had battled his way back to her house was sign enough of his bull-headedness.
But her feeling, as she confronted him, was not one of actual fear. He was, after all, merely a "rough-neck." He was nothing more than a lathe-worker who had gone wrong, a mechanic who had stolen factory secrets and was bent on financing his stolen papers. And if Kestner or Wilsnach only got back in time there was still a fighting chance of slipping out of the man's clutches.
"So they did things to yuh, too!" repeated Sadie.
Dorgan, ignoring her exclamation, sank into a chair. He turned about, with a strangely bird-like movement, and sat studying her out of his one good eye. A look of grim approbation crept over his battered face.
"You're about the nerviest skirt I ever hitched up with!" he finally ejaculated.
Sadie, having absorbed the full significance of those words, breathed easier.
"Oh, yuh weren't without your nerve, takin' a decent girl into a dump like that!" she announced, with a parade of anger.
He sat solemnly cogitating this accusation.
"D'you suppose I thought Kendall was going to pull any of that strong-arm stuff?"
"Who's Kendall?" she demanded. The more they talked, she began to realize, the wider would be her margin of safety. And Kestner, she remembered, ought to be there at any moment.
"Kendall's the man we tried to do business with—the big blond stiff with the saber-marks on the cheek!"
So Kendall, Sadie inwardly remarked, was another name for Keudell. And Keudell rather interested her, even while he intimidated her. He was of a type altogether different to Dorgan. Keudell would be tricky, and apt to keep you guessing, with that cool eye which never put you wise to when he was bluffing and when he was beaten. And she was glad it was Dorgan, and not Keudell, that she had to combat.
"He certainly put a few marks on me!" declared the irate-eyed young woman.
Dorgan sniffed.
"You can't hold a candle to what I got," he announced. "And I guess Kendall had to take a jolt or two himself." Dorgan wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "And he'll bump into his biggest jolt when he finds out it was you who got away with those papers!"
"How'll he find out?" inquired Sadie, realizing that the talk was veering around to rather dangerous ground.
"I'll see that he knows," was Dorgan's quick retort. "And I'll see that he doesn't get another chance at them!"
Sadie saw his face change; and the thin voice of some deep-kenneled instinct told her of the question he was about to ask, even before the words were spoken. "You've got those papers all right?" he suddenly demanded.
"Sure!" was Sadie's casual reply.
"And you've got 'em on you?" he continued.
"Sure I have," she replied. Yet the next moment she could have bitten her tongue-point off for that insane admission. She realized then that she should have proclaimed they were not immediately available; that they had been stored away for safe-keeping; that it would take a little time to get them—anything to hold him off until Kestner could be sent to her help. She knew, intuitively, what Dorgan's next demand would be, and she was resolved that its utterance should be withheld as long as possible. So it was with a show of sudden hot resentment that she jumped up from her chair and fusilladed him with her quick volleys of indignation.
"But I wantta know the reason for all this rough-house," she stormed with a violence that made him wince. "I wantta know the meanin' of all this gumshoein' and door-lockin' and gun-play. And just why'd that pork-eyed gink wit' the sword-marks gimme the chase up over the cat-teasers? And jus' why'd yuh root me out o' this decent palm-readin' emporium and try to make me a runner-in for a bunch o' papers I don't know nothin' about and I don't b'lieve are worth a tradin' stamp?"
"Haven't you any idea what those papers are?" demanded Dorgan.
"The only thing I've gotta an idea about is that my floatin' ribs are sure achin' for a six-course dinner! I ain't no freight-jumper, and bein' throwed around by a couple o' wild-eyed boobs ain't my idea of indoor sports! And what t'ell am I goin' to git out o' being man-hauled by a he-butler that looks like a missin' link and then finished off by that pink-gilled wop wit' the meat-carver fresco-work all over his map!"
The unbandaged side of Dorgan's face wrinkled up with a semblance of mirth. Then it grew solemn again.
"You're all right!" he gravely and appreciatively announced. "And if you hadn't split that butler's shin-bone we'd have had Kendall down here on top of us long before this! Yes, sir; you're all right!"
"No, I ain't all right!" promptly contended Sadie, still talking against time. "I swung in to help yuh outta a hole, but I ain't seen nothin' in all this to be writin' home about!"
"Well, what were you expecting out of it?"
"I expeck t'know where I'm at!"
"Where you're at? You're back home, aren't you? And you didn't have to have a hotel doctor solder you up before you got here, did you? Well, I did!"
"And after bein' pounded 'round by a couple o' crooks yuh made for the tall timber without a sign of a come-back!"
Sadie's lips curled with scorn.
"Say! D'you suppose I'm going to let that man Kendall hang the Indian sign on me and expect to get away with it?" was Dorgan's angry demand. "Not much! He tried to put one over on me, and he's going to pay for it!"
Sadie deemed it best to follow her new tack of bull-baiting.
"Yuh look as though yuh'd been makin' him pay for it!" was the girl's contemptuous rejoinder.
Dorgan was on his feet in a twinkling. There was something more than ever taurine about the squared shoulders and the belligerently lowered head.
"Give me those papers," was his quiet, unlocked for demand. "Give me those papers, and I'll show you!"
Sadie's lips still curled with contempt, but in her opulent young bosom she experienced a feeling not unlike that which comes to the passenger of an express-elevator on its downward flight. It was the fatal demand at last. And she could see no way of evading it.
She dropped into her chair, behind the black-draped table, and made a pretense of fumbling with her skirt-edges. Then she suddenly sat up, looked at Dorgan's expectantly poised figure, and from Dorgan turned her gaze toward the door.
"What's that?" she demanded.
For clearly to her now came the sound of contending voices from the hall without. She knew, as she listened, that one of those voices was Kestner's, and a great wave of relief sped through her tired body. There was still a chance, she felt, if only the cards could be played right.
But she was puzzled by the fact that Kestner's voice was rising high and angry above the protesting tones of the negress. She was still worrying over this discovery when the door opened and Kestner himself strode into the room. But it was a Kestner in no way like the immaculate Kestner of old. His wet hat was pulled down over his eyes, and he carried a newspaper in his hand. Sadie, with her heart in her mouth, tried to arrest him with a warning glance. But the newcomer deliberately ignored both Dorgan and the challenging eye of Dorgan which studied him from under its turban-llke bandage. He walked straight to the table where Sadie Wimpel sat.
"So you call yourself a clairvoyant!" he shouted, and still Sadie could not comprehend the source of his indignation. She gestured to him for caution, for silence, but he ignored the movement.
"You're about the cheesiest thing at picking track-winners that ever got loose!" he irately avowed,
"I'm what?" asked the amazed Sadie.
Kestner flung his folded newspaper indignantly down on the table in front of her.
"You had the nerve to take a fiver for that sure-thing tip of yours," he declared, menacing her with an unsteady forefinger, "and you didn't come within a mile of a winner!" He pushed the paper toward her. "Did you get a look-in on that list? And did you or didn't you advise me to go the limit on those two long shots you were so sure about?"
Sadie resignedly shook her head. It was too much for her. Then she wearily took up the paper and held it in front of her. As she did so her quick eye caught sight of the end of a scaled manila envelope showing from between its folded pages. Her face did not change. But she drew in a great breath of relief. She could have hugged Kestner until his collar-bones cracked.
Instead of any such amatory outburst, however, she suddenly rose to her feet and confronted him with a show of anger as great as his own. And as she did so the folded newspaper fell from the table-edge to the floor where she stood.
"Whadda yuh mean by blowin' in here and interrupting a privut readin'?" demanded Sadie, making sure her foot was planted on the yellow envelope. "I ain't no sheet writer, and I ain't no miracle worker—"
"No, but you're a bunco-steerer, and you can't con me!"
"Say, yuh big four-flush, if yuh could lay a bet as vig'rous as yuh can beef over a lost chance yuh'd be a second Canfield b'fore the spring circuits closed!"
"I've laid my bets! And now I'm goin' to lay a complaint!"
"Well, yuh needn't cackle as if yuh was goin' to lay an egg!"
"You're a faker!"
"Whadda yuh goin' to do about it?"
"I'm going to have you pinched, that's what I'm going to do about it!"
Sadie leisurely took her seat.
"Yuh got any other business wit' me?" she asked. "For this is my crowded evenin' and I ain't got much time for pikers!"
"You'll have time to burn when I get through with you!"
Sadie, turning to the door, called to her turbaned negress.
"Zuleika, show this gen'l'mun where he kin find the nearest cop!"
"And you think I won't come back with him?" demanded the irate intruder.
"It costs yuh money to know what I think!" calmly announced the girl behind the black-draped table. A sense of triumph welled through her tired body. She felt like an actress who had faced one of her big scenes and had not failed in it. Yet she knew a vague sensation of anxiety, at the thought of her impending isolation, when she saw Kestner turn away. She had always been a little intimidated by the man from the Paris office. But never had her desire for his companionship been keener.
"You'll soon change your song!" he announced, as he paused for a moment at the end of the snake-embossed screen and stared belligerently back at her. Sadie, as he turned and stalked out, raked her mind for some adequate excuse to keep him there. But she could find none. She began to realize, to her inner consternation, that she would have to face whatever that night held for her, and face it alone. And she tried to figure up how many hours it was since she had eaten.
"That's the brand o' squealer I've gotta face ev'ry day in this business," she wrathfully announced.
But Dorgan, who had dropped into his chair and remained utterly passive through all this scene, suddenly swung about on her.
"You're steering for a fall here," he announced, with calm conviction.
"I'm what?" demanded Sadie, making sure the manila envelope was under her foot.
"I've got a hunch you're going to have trouble here! There's something wrong about that guy, and I know it!"
"How d' yuh know it?"
"He's the same guy I saw gum-shoeing around here two days ago! And if he's not putting something over on this house there's nothing in a hunch."
"Well, all he can do is close me up."
"Then what'll you do?"
Sadie pondered this question. The zest of battle was in her veins and she wanted no misstep to mar her chance of final victory. She was one small factor working blindly in a campaign which she could not comprehend in its entirety. But there were certain things, she knew, which Wilsnach was demanding of her, and she did not propose to be a blunderhead in the Service.
She let her gaze dwell pregnantly on Dorgan's battered features. She still had very thin ice, she remembered, over which to pick her way.
"I was thinkin' yuh might finance me for a move on to the Windy City, if I gotta move," she solemnly yet blandly suggested.
Dorgan shifted his chair closer to the table behind which she sat. Then he studied her face for a moment or two.
"I've got to beat it myself," he finally began.
"And how about me?" queried Sadie.
"That's what I'm coming to!" was his answer. Still again he studied her face, and her hopes rose with his silent nod of approval. But they went as promptly down again at the next words he spoke.
"Let me see that envelope of mine!"
She was conscious enough of the danger ahead of her. She knew that everything depended on whether he accepted that envelope as it was or tore it open and discovered that it no longer held his secret plans. One rip of the manila paper flap and the game was up. Yet she knew that further equivocation would only serve to leave him suspicious, and increase the danger. So she betrayed neither hesitation nor active concern as she stooped down behind her table, fumbled for a moment with her dress drapery, and then tossed the sealed envelope on the table-top.
It was the envelope, and not the man's face, that she watched as his heavily sinewed hand descended on the yellow oblong of paper, turned it over and then placed it again on the table-top.
"Lady," said Dorgan, as he sat back in his chair, "you've done me a good turn; and I'm going to square up for it, but I can't square up in cash!"
Sadie scarcely heard his words, for all her mind was intent on that menacing oblong of yellow. Her very heart stopped beating as he again reached out a hand, leisurely took up the envelope and as leisurely stowed it down in his inner breast pocket, buttoning the flap of this pocket over it. It was then and only then that Sadie came back to earth.
"Cash's about the only thing that kin talk wit' me!" she announced. And she announced it with vigor, for she saw the tide of affairs was now flowing in her direction.
He leaned forward again and tapped his coat-front just over his heart.
"I'm going to slope up to Canada and sit on this nest-egg of mine until the excitement blows over," he quietly explained to her. "This town's too hot for me, and I can afford to wait until it cools down. Money isn't much good after they've given you a number and shaved your head."
"It'd help me along consider'ble!" acknowledged Sadie.
Dorgan was on his feet by this time, and had taken off his coat. Then he as deliberately took off his vest and placed it on the end of the table.
"Goin' to turn in?" Sadie solemnly inquired.
But Dorgan, as he took a small pen-knife from one pocket of the vest, did not even smile.
"No; it's more a case of turn out," he explained as he flattened the vest on the table-top. He saw the look of wonder in her eyes, and wrinkled his face in a one-sided smile as he stood for a moment looking down at her.
"I'm taking a chance with you I wouldn't take with any man this side of the Ohio," he went on, as he opened the knife, turned over one edge of the vest and began picking but the stitching along its lining-front.
Sadie watched him as he pulled the released edges of this vest-lining apart and from its hiding-place between the garment-padding drew out an oblong of black silk carefully stitched about the edges.
This oblong was scarcely eight inches long and two inches wide, and no thicker than an empty card-case.
"That's your pay!" announced Dorgan as he tossed it down on the table. He took up his vest and put it on. Then he did the same with his coat.
Sadie continued to view him with carefully coerced disapproval as he once more took up the pen-knife and proceeded to cut the stitching at one end of his mysterious oblong of black silk. From the interior of this sheathing he drew out a sheet or two of paper tightly folded together.
"I ain't interested in house-plans," she wearily announced, as he unfolded the thin sheets on her table-top and revealed to her puzzled eye an indescribably intricate network of lines and figures and lettering, the latter so crowded and minute that for all its scholar-like precision she was unable to read it.
"House-plans!" ejaculated Dorgan, holding up one of the sheets in front of her. "Do you call that a cottage wall or the cross-section of a coast gun?"
"I never seen no gun like that!" avowed Sadie, squinting closer at the paper.
"No; you never did! And what's more, not six people outside official circles ever did either! Do you know what that is? That's the government's new seventeen-inch coast gun with the secret Winton breech-block. There's the whole business, right there on two sheets of paper!"
"It don't look much t' me!" protested the unimpressed Sadie with a shoulder-shrug of disdain.
"Well, it will certainly look good to any gun expert who happens to clap eyes on it. And it'll look so good to a man hanging out up at the Alsatia Hotel that he'll hand you over quite a few hundred dollars for those specifications!"
"What man?" inquired the still skeptic Sadie.
"He's a guy called Breitman!"
Sadie stooped lower over the paper that still lay on the table. For a distinct quiver of nerves sped through her body at the mention of that all too familiar name. Breitman, she remembered, was one of the aliases under which her old-time enemy, Wallaby Sam, was wont to masquerade.
She suddenly felt that she was on the fringe of movements that were too momentous for her. The thought of her own insignificance intimidated her, made her wish for the reappearance of Wilsnach or the intervention of Kestner himself. But she knew that she was ordained to blunder along alone. And since she must go it alone, she decided to go it slow.
"Where'd you get 'em?" she asked, with a careless hand movement toward the closely figured sheet which he had dropped on the table.
The barricaded look that came into his eye at that question did not escape her.
"I got that gun plan before I got this other stuff!" he explained, as he tapped his breast with a casual forefinger.
"But where?" she persisted, for she knew that if there were leaks both Wilsnach and Kestner and the chief himself would want to know where those leaks had occurred.
"Up at Watervliet," he acknowledged.
"And how?"
"I roomed with an Austrian named Heinold. He put me wise to what could be made out of some of the ordnance secrets, once we got away with them. He was in the gun works there with me, but they got leery and held up his mail. He skipped the country before he could make his deal. I decided to move on, after that, so I got a transfer to Navy Department work."
"And what t'ell good is a gun map goin' to be to me, or to this man Breitman, or any other wop who isn't busy runnin' a gun factory?" demanded Sadie. It was well, she knew, not to appear too wise.
"That gun," retorted Dorgan, pounding with an impressive forefinger on the table-top, "is the gun that's going to win the next war. The country that knows how to make it is the country that comes out first. And the foreign agent who thinks you've got those specifications is going to be after 'em as keen as Kendall was after that new submarine. And he'd got it if he played straight, but he played crooked and lost his chance!"
Sadie's sigh was one of exhausted patience.
"And this guy up at the Alsatia is one o' them foreign agents?"
"Sure he is! And it's up to you to finance this thing so we can split even on the proceeds. It'll put you on Easy Street. All you've got to do is to make sure of the money before you hand over the papers. We've got the real thing; there isn't another copy outside of Strauss' office in Washington!"
Sadie reached out a languid hand and picked up the sheets. She looked them over with an indifferent eye, and then proceeded to fold them together.
"And what 'm I to git for this stuff?" she inquired.
"As much as you can—the more the better!"
Sadie sat back and viewed him with open hostility. But she made it a point to keep the folded sheets still between her fingers.
"Say, what d'yuh take me for anyway, talkin' about peddlin' 'round gun plans that'll gimme a limousine and Eyetalian gardens out on Long Island? Doesn't it strike yuh that ol' stuff's about as dead as the dropped pocketbook gag and the filled-watch stall! It's about even wit' the ol' silkworm scheme and the Spanish prisoner fake that caught 'em ev'ry time in the early eighties! But yuh can't make it go down wit' this generation! Yuh gotta change your dope, or the wire-gang'll tap into your circuit and sure steer yuh for an early fall!"
"Listen to me!" cried Dorgan, suddenly swinging about on her.
But Sadie, at that particular moment, was not listening to him. Her thoughts were elsewhere. For still again from beyond her room-door she heard the sound of voices, the expostulatory tones of the bewildered Zuleika, and the heavier tones of the unknown intruder whose entrance she seemed to be disputing.
For a second or two Sadie thought the intruder might be Wilsnach come back, or even Kestner himself. But intervention so timely as that, she felt, was too good to be true.
Dorgan himself suddenly backed away and turned to the door, with his head thrust forward and his one visible eye interrogatively blinking. Then he looked a little helplessly at the languid-eyed seeress behind the table, for louder above the thick notes of the huge negress suddenly sounded the authoritative guttural of the man's voice. Then came a silence which seemed interminable.
"That's Kendall!" said Dorgan in a whisper, as he continued to retreat until he stood with his back against the wall.