ng welcher, for we may as well understand
one another, from the start. Now that Penfield's shut up his Newport
place and is coolin' his heels up in Montreal for a few months, I'm
runnin' this nickel-plated ranch myself. And I've got a few old scores
to wipe out--some old scores between that enterprisin' husband o' yours
an' myself!"

"What has he ever done to you? Why, should you want to punish _him_?"
argued Frank, helplessly.

"I'm not goin' to punish him!" declared MacNutt, with a little laugh.
"That's just where the damned fine poetic justice of the thing comes
in. _He's goin' to punish himself_!"

CHAPTER XXI

THE PIT OF DESPAIR

Frances Durkin looked at the jeering man before her, studiously,
belligerently.

"What do you mean by saying he'll punish himself?" she demanded.

She seemed like a woman who had just awakened. Her earlier comatose
expression had altogether passed away. There was life, now, in every
line of her body.

"I mean that Durkin's got his quarter of a million in securities, all
right, all right, but, by God, I've got _you_! And I mean that he's
goin' to, that he's _got_ to, make a choice between them and you. So
we'll just wait and find out which he loves best, his beau or his
dough!" And he laughed harshly at the feeble witticism, as he added,
in his guttural undertone: "And I guess we get the worth of our money,
whichever way it goes!"

Frank's impression was that he was half drunk, that he was mumbling
vaguely of revenges which grew up and died in their utterance. Her
look of open scorn stung him into a sudden tremor of anger.

"Oh, don't think I'm spoutin' wind! If Durkin's the man you think he
is, and I hope he is, _he'll be tryin' to nose his way into this place
before midnight tonight_!"

"And he will," cried Frank, exultantly, "and with the whole precinct
police force behind him!"

"He daren't!" retorted MacNutt. "He daren't get within a hundred yards
of the Central Office, and he daren't show his nose inside a precinct
station-house! And that's not all, either. There's no captain on this
side of New York who's goin' to buck against the whole Tammany machine
an' poke into this Penfield business. If that young man with the
butterfly necktie over on Centre street thinks he can keep us movin',
he's got to do a heap less talkin' and a heap more convictin' before he
can put _our_ lights out! That air is good enough for politics--but
it's never goin' to bre