Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/194

Eunice appeared a little frightened, as though the directness of the question had upset her. But Jock noticed nothing. He was engrossed in his own reaction to her reply . . . in despising himself because he could not deny that it was a disappointment. "You wanted her to tell!" his thoughts accused him. "You wanted her to say yes, she'd told the whole thing! Just to save your own skin, you hoped she'd done Brad a trick like that—that you wouldn't be willing to do yourself—say, what kind of a cur are you, anyway?"

Eunice's next words slapped at his ears like an added reproof. "How could I, Jock? You don't think I ought to go around tellin' people poah old Brad was a bootleggah, do you? And that he sold poison liquah to a——"

"No, no, of course not!"

"It's bettah they should think I'm no good than that he wasn't," Eunice asserted piously. "He's dead now. I'm the one that's got to suffah."

Then Jock's spleen at himself shifted to her, redoubled a hundredfold. Eunice! Self-commiserating! "I'm the one that's got to suffer" . . . she could say that with a straight face, a sad face, and in that aggrieved and martyred manner! Why, it was so preposterous as to be laughable! But he did not laugh. He stood and listened with a sort of detached appreciation while the invectives that had long lain dormant awoke and poured themselves cruelly, scaldingly, from his tongue.

"And why in God's name shouldn't you suffer? What made him a bootlegger—what started all this in the first place, just answer me that? Do you imagine for one minute Brad Hathaway would ever have dirtied his hands like that of his own free will?