thoroughly mercenary, so frankly greedy, that there's nothing disagreeable about it. You'll understand what I mean when you get to know her."
"Maybe. Mind telling me how you came to part with her?"
"No, I don't mind. I spent it all, that's how."
"Cold-blooded like that?"
His face flushed a little. He nodded.
"You seemed to have taken it well, anyway," I said.
"There's nothing else to do." The flush in his pleasant young face deepened and he spoke hesitantly. "And it happens I owe her a lot for it. She—I'm going to tell you this—I want you to see this side of her. I had a little money. After that was gone—you must remember I'm not very old and I was head over heels—there was the bank's money. I had— You don't care whether I had actually done anything or just thinking about it. Anyhow, she found it out. I never could hide anything from her. And that was the end."
"She gave you the air?"
"Yes, she did. So if it hadn't been for her you might have been hunting for me now. I owe her that!" He wrinkled his forehead earnestly. "You won't say anything about this—you know what I mean. I just wanted you to know that she had her good side, too."
"Maybe she has. Or maybe it was that she didn't think she'd get enough to pay for the chance of being caught in a jam."
He turned that over in his mind for a minute and shook his head.
"How about Dan Rolff?" he objected.
"Who's he?"
"A down-and-outer—t. b. He's supposed to be her brother, or half-brother, or something of the sort. He lives there. She keeps him. She's not in love with him or anything of the sort. She just found him somewhere and took him in."
"Mark one up for here. Any more?"
"There was that radical chap she used to play with. It's a cinch she never got much money out of him."
"What radical chap was this?"
"The chap who came here in 1919 to run the strike—Quint."
"So he's still on her list?"
"That's supposed to be the reason he stayed after the strike was over."
"So he's still on her list?"
"No. She told me she was afraid of him—he had threatened to kill her."
"Has she had everybody in town on her string at one time or another?" I asked.
"Everybody she wanted," he said, and he said it seriously.
"Well, what about her and Donald Willsson?"
"I don't know a thing about that—absolutely nothing. He had never issued any checks to her before, that I know of."
"Then he was probably recent?"
"Probably—but why did he have the check certified?"
I didn't know. I could have made some guesses, but none that I wanted to put into words. During the rest of the dinner we talked back and forth over the ground we had already covered, and I picked up nothing else of any value. A eight-thirty young Albury ran off to keep a date.
Bill Quint had told me he was living in the Miners' Hotel in Forest Street. I waled down that way and was lucky enough to run into him in the street half a block or so from the hotel.
"Hello," I hailed him, "I was just coming down to see you."
He stopped in front of me, looked me up and down, growled, "So you're a lousy gum-shoe," pursed his gray lips, and by forcing breath out through them made a noise like a rag tearing.
"That's the bunk!" I complained. "I come all the way down here to rope you and you're smarted up!"
"What'd you want to know this time?" he demanded.
"I'll save my breath. You'd only lie to me. So long."
