Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/345

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"White is my name, Miss Boland; just plain Larry White."

"Thank you, Mr. White," Billie murmured, and pressed the jailor's hand fervently, then fled out the door and down the steps faster than her maid could follow; and it was not fear of the flames that made her hasten.

Henry, panting at last to the top of the bluff, was really relieved to find Humboldt House still standing. The mob had not rushed up here then. But the house seemed dark; yet he knew it had a private electric plant and surmised the curtains were tightly drawn; however, the front he realized must be illumined by the conflagration. Under cover of a cedar hedge and furtively for strategic reasons rather than through remembering that his status was that of a prisoner illegally at large, he made his way round the house, there to be halted abruptly, for the wide veranda not twenty yards away was at least half as light as day and alive with people, thirty or forty perhaps, standing along the rustic rail in groups, staring gloomily and talking in low, dejected voices. These, of course, would be the families of Boland executives, who had been burned out down below.

Their presence, so close to him, gave Henry an odd sort of start. Scanlon was there, no doubt; and Quackenbaugh—the men who had conspired to ruin him. He found his teeth gritting, his wild rage at them heightening. He edged nearer, still keeping close under the shadow of the hedge, and was rewarded by making out Old Two Blades himself, a little apart, his privacy respected by the others, standing motion-