"Don't you worry about any unfinished business of Miss Lauderdale," Harford added with augmented insolence. "I think she will concede that I am more competent and quite as willing as you to attend any and all such. On my advice she has given up her search for a mythical needle mythically buried in this park haystack. Haven't you, Jane? _Haven't_ you, dear?"
Pape, while listening to the man, looked to the woman; gained her gaze, saw her lips form to an unvoiced "No." Fresh love for her and fresh hate for him--fresh suspicion and the courage thereof possessed him.
"Meantime, I suppose, your hirelings are tumbling up this park haystack according to the directions of that cryptogram you took from Mrs. Sturgis' wall-safe?"
"You damned blighter, you dare accuse me of theft?"
Pape laughed into the snarled demand. "And why not accuse? I don't like you and I don't trust you. Miss Lauderdale's unfinished business is safer in my hands than yours. You lie when you say that she has transferred it to you. She knows who is the better man. In case you're not sure, I am ready to show."
"No readier than I, you weak fish out of water." Harford's voice shook into higher, harder notes. "You couldn't very well call me a thief and a liar without showing. As I told you this morning you'll have to answer to me if you raise any more of a row around Miss Lauderdale. When will you give me a chance to----"
"You don't mean here, before the girls, in a public place where the cops are likely----"
Lightly though he laughed, he was heavy with hate, again moved by that battleful mania which is the sanity of love. To him specific insults did not matter so much. The importance of the whys, wheres or whences grew all at once negligible. To have it out with the man who contested his claim to his woman--to bring him down just on general principles--to wring him and rend him and trample him, if need be, into acknowledgment of his supreme impertinence--that was his present task.
A thought-flash of the moment before had thrown rays of suspicion several ways through Pape's mind. Mills Harford knew of the Montana Gusher swindle, as indicated by his jibe of that morning about an "oil-stock shark." Being a real-estater of considerable success, he might be a principal in that fraud. Certainly he did not seem the man to have been a victim.