“Reaction, my eye,” I said. “You’re scared stiff. But no nonsense, mind! If you try to make a vaudeville act out of it I’ll ruin whatever these guerrillas leave of you. You do what you’re told, and nothing else. If you get any bright ideas, save ’em to tell me about afterward.”
“Oh, my conduct will be most exemplary!” he assured me.
IX
It was nearly midnight when what the wolves waited for came. The last pretense of indifference went out of faces that had been gradually taking on tenseness. Chairs and feet scraped as men pushed themselves back a little from their tables. Muscles flexed bodies into readiness for action. Tongues licked lips and eyes looked eagerly at the front door.
Bluepoint Vance was coming into the room. He came alone, nodding to acquaintances on this side and that, carrying his tall body gracefully, easily, in its well-cut clothing. His sharp-featured face was smilingly self-confident. He came without haste and without delay to Red O’Leary’s table. I couldn’t see Red’s face, but muscles thickened the back of his neck. The girl smiled cordially at Vance and gave him her hand. It was naturally done. She didn’t know anything.
Vance turned his smile from Nancy Regan to the red-haired giant—a smile that was a trifle cat-to-mousey.
“How’s everything, Red?” he asked.
“Everything suits me,” bluntly.
The orchestra had stopped playing. Larrouy, standing by the street door, was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. At the table to my right, a barrel-chested, broken-nosed bruiser in a widely striped suit was breathing heavily between his gold teeth, his watery gray eyes bulging at O’Leary, Vance and Nancy. He was in no way conspicuous—there were too many others holding the same pose.
Bluepoint Vance turned his head, called to a waiter: “Bring me a chair.”
The chair was brought and put at the unoccupied side of the table, facing the wall. Vance sat down, slumping back in the chair, leaning indolently toward Red, his left arm hooked over the chair-back, his right hand holding a cigarette.
“Well, Red,” he said when he was thus installed, “have you got any news for me?”
His voice was suave, but loud enough for those at nearby tables to hear.
“Not a word.” O’Leary’s voice made no pretense of friendliness, nor of caution.
“What, no spinach?” Vance’s thin-lipped smile spread, and his dark eyes had a mirthful but not pleasant glitter. “Nobody gave you anything to give me?”
“No,” said O’Leary, emphatically.
“My goodness!” said Vance, the smile in his eyes and mouth deepening, and getting still less pleasant. “That’s ingratitude! Will you help me collect, Red?”
“No.”
I was disgusted with this redhead—half-minded to let him go under when the storm broke. Why couldn’t he have stalled his way out—fixed up a fancy tale that Bluepoint would have had to halfway accept? But no—this O’Leary boy was so damned childishly proud of his toughness that he had to make a show of it when he should have been using his bean. If it had been only his own carcass that was due for a beating, it would have been all right. But it wasn’t all right that Jack and I should have to suffer. This big chump was too valuable to lose. We’d have to get ourselves all battered up saving him from the rewards of his own pigheadedness. There was no justice in it.
“I’ve got a lot of money coming to me, Red.” Vance spoke lazily, tauntingly. “And I need that money.” He drew on his cigarette, casually blew the smoke into the redhead’s face, and drawled, “Why, do you know the laundry charges twenty-six cents just for doing a pair of pajamas? I need money.”
“Sleep in your underclothes,” said O’Leary.
Vance laughed. Nancy Regan smiled, but in a bewildered way. She didn’t seem to know what it was all about, but she couldn’t help knowing that it was about something.
O’Leary leaned forward and spoke deliberately, loud enough for any to hear:
“Bluepoint, I’ve got nothing to give you—now or ever. And that goes for anybody else that’s interested. If you or them think I owe you something—try and get it. To hell with you, Bluepoint Vance! If you don’t like it—you’ve got friends here. Call ’em on!”
What a prime young idiot! Nothing would suit him but an ambulance—and I must be dragged along with him.
Vance grinned evilly, his eyes glittering into O’Leary’s face.
“You’d like that, Red?”
O’Leary hunched his big shoulders and let them drop.
“I don’t mind a fight,” he said. “But I’d like to get Nancy out of it.” He turned to her. “Better run along, honey, I’m going to be busy.”
She started to say something, but Vance was talking to her. His words were lightly spoken, and he made no objection to her going. The substance of what he told her was that she was going to be lonely without Red. But he went intimately into the details of that loneliness.
Red O’Leary’s right hand rested on the table. It went up to Vance’s mouth. The hand was a fist when it got there. A wallop of that sort is awkward to deliver. The body can’t give it much. It has to depend on the arm muscles, and not on the best of those. Yet Bluepoint Vance was driven out of his chair and across to the next table.
Larrouy’s chairs went empty. The shindig was on.
“On your toes,” I growled at Jack Counihan, and, doing my best to look like the nervous little fat man I was, I ran toward the back door, passing men who were moving not yet swiftly toward O’Leary. I must have looked the part of a scared trouble-dodger, because nobody stopped me, and I reached the door before the pack had closed on Red. The door was closed, but not locked. I wheeled with my back to it, blackjack in right hand, gun in left. Men were in front of me, but their backs were to me.
O’Leary was towering in front of his table, his tough red face full of bring-on-your-hell, his big
