“No, putting things into print doesn’t seem to be my business any more,” interpolated the morose-eyed Lipsett.
“Then why——” began Gunboat, but he was interrupted by the trill of the telephone bell. It was Teddie who finally crossed to the instrument and answered the call.
“It’s for you, Mr. Dorgan,” she said, without emotion, as she waited with the receiver in her hand.
“Oh, is that yuh, Ruby,” Gunboat was murmuring a moment later, into the transmitter. He spoke in a strangely altered tone, a tone with even a touch of meekness in it. “All right, Ruby,” he docilely agreed after several minutes of an obviously one-sided conversation. “Sure, Ruby, yuh’re dead right.” Then came the receiver’s turn again, with an amending “Whatever yuh say, Ruby,” gently intoned into the transmitter.
If Teddie garnered any inkling of that capitulating meekness on Gunboat Dorgan’s part, she gave out no echo of it in her own icy stare of disapproval as she stood regarding Gerald Rhindelander West. Even the rueful Louis Lipsett awakened to that oddly sustained duel of glances between the two silent figures on the far side of the room. He awakened, in fact, to the all-pervading, three-cornered preoccupation which surrounded him. And he made hay while the sun shone. He took advantage of that momentary inattention and slipped from his chair. He tiptoed discreetly out of the room and hurried away into the comparative quietness of Fourth Street, where he caught a Broadway surface-car and headed for the peace of Park Row.
Gunboat Dorgan, as he meditatively hung up the receiver, did not even miss the vanished newspaper man. He was too busy watching the strange couple still confronting each other on the far side of the studio. The girl, with ice-cold deliberation, pinned a tiptilted turban on her head, adjusted a four-piece blue-fox throw about her shoulders, and drew on a pair of wrinkled-topped gloves.
“Where are you going?” demanded the dark-browed expounder of the law, in a tone savoring unmistakably of the cave-man age.
“I regard that as entirely my own affair,” retorted the girl in blue-fox, just as unmistakably reverting to the age of ice.
“Where are you going?” repeated the neolithic young giant in tweeds.