Perched on the arm of a chair near the window, taking quick deft stitches, she heard a sound. She had never heard that sound before—that peculiar sound—the slow, ominous tread of men laden with a heavy inert burden; bearing with infinite care that which was well beyond hurting. Selina had never heard that sound before, and yet, hearing it, she recognized it by one of those pangs, centuries old, called woman’s instinct. Thud—shuffle—thud—shuffle—up the narrow stairway, along the passage. She stood up, the needle poised in her hand. The hat fell to the floor. Her eyes were wide, fixed. Her lips slightly parted. The listening look. She knew.
She knew even before she heard the hoarse man’s voice saying, “Lift ’er up there a little on the corner, now. Easy—e-e-easy.” And Mrs. Tebbitt’s high shrill clamour: “You can’t bring it in there! You hadn’t ought to bring it in here like this!”
Selina’s suspended breath came back. She was panting now. She had flung open the door. A flat still burden partially covered with an overcoat carelessly flung over the face. The feet, in their square-toed boots, wobbled listlessly. Selina noticed how shiny the boots were. He was always very finicking about such things.
Simeon Peake had been shot in Jeff Hankins’s place at five in the afternoon. The irony of it was that the bullet had not been intended for him at all. Its derelict course had been due to feminine aim. Sped by one of those over-dramatic ladies who, armed with horsewhip or pistol in tardy defence of their honour, spangled Chicago’s dull ’80s with their doings, it had been meant for a well-known newspaper publisher usually mentioned (in papers other than his own) as a bon vivant. The lady’s leaden remonstrance was to have been proof of the fact that he had been more vivacious than bon.
It was, perhaps, because of this that the matter was pretty well hushed up. The publisher’s paper—which was Chicago’s foremost—scarcely mentioned the incident and purposely misspelled the name. The lady, thinking her task accomplished, had taken truer aim with her second bullet, and had saved herself the trouble of trial by human jury.
Simeon Peake left his daughter Selina a legacy of two fine clear blue-white diamonds (he had had the gambler’s love of them) and the sum of four hundred and ninety-seven dollars in cash. Just how he had managed to have a sum like this put by was a mystery. The envelope containing it had evidently once held a larger sum. It had been sealed, and then slit. On the outside was written, in Simeon Peake’s fine, almost feminine hand: “For my little daughter Selina Peake in case anything should happen to me.” It bore a date seven years old. What the original sum had been no one ever knew. That any sum remained was evidence of the almost heroic self-control practised by one to whom money—ready money in any sum at all—meant only fuel to feed the flames of his gaming fever.