"Softly, my good Morphew! I am about to do you a service--appreciating as I do how worried you have been, and how pained, by the ungrateful behavior of your tool and accomplice, Mal--"
"Shut your mouth, d'you hear?" Morphew bellowed, swaying his huge head upon his shoulders like an infuriated animal about to charge. "Take your prisoner, Mr. Sheriff! If this woman won't charge him with the burglary he's committed here tonight, _I_ charge him with breaking into my house in New York last night--"
The bellow ran out in a gasp that was followed by a choking noise. A long arm had shot out over Morphew's shoulder from behind, and the bony but powerful hand at the end of it had closed upon his wrist, jerking the muzzle of the pistol toward the ceiling. As he swung round with an incoherent roar another hand, the mate to the first, deftly seized the weapon and twisted it from his grasp. He stared, in apoplectic speechlessness, into the countenance composed yet sardonic of Crane.
Unobserved by anybody other than Eve and Lanyard, the detective had quietly stepped in through the open window, closely followed by an associate, a mild-mannered body hall-marked police detective by the derby hat of tradition.
"Y'oughtn't to get gay like that with loaded firearms," Crane counselled in gently pained reproach--"y'ought to know better, a man your age!" His mouth hardened and he clamped fingers like the jaws of a vice on Morphew's shoulder, nipping truculent bluster in the bud. "Crane's my name, if you want to know, but bull's my nature, Mister Morphew; and remember this"--eyes that had the glint of steel between narrowed lids cowed Morphew's--"I don't ask no better luck than for you to give me a good excuse to get even with you for all the trouble you've been putting me to, first and last. Keep a civil tongue on your head if you value your health!"
Morphew cast glances mutely eloquent of tormented appeal to his henchmen; but they were one and all inattentive, to a man preoccupied with the attitude of Crane's associate. And yet it had all the seeming of the most inoffensive attitude imaginable. The mild-mannered man was doing nothing whatever more than mildly keeping mild eyes on them and his hands in his overcoat pockets. It is true that both the said pockets boasted singular bulges, as if two forefingers of derision were being pointed under their cover . . .