"Yes. Who reads 'em first?"
"Breslau. Or some skirt, maybe."
"What's Breslau?"
"Search me. He's a Dutchman or a Rooshian or some sort of Dodo. What
do you care?"
"I don't. All right, Ben. You've got to show me; that's all."
"Show you what?"
"Spot cash!"
"You're in when you handle it?"
"If you show me real money--yes."
"You're on. I'll cash a cheque of Quint's for you at Monroe's soon as
we hit the asphalt! And when you finish counting out your gold nickels
put 'em in your pants and play the game! Is that right?"
"Yes."
They exchanged a wary handshake; then, one after another, they leaned
back in their seats with the air of honest men who had done their
day's work.
Curfoot blinked at Brandes, at his excessively groomed person, at his
rings.
"You look prosperous, Eddie."
"It's his business to," remarked Stull.
Brandes yawned: "It would be a raw deal if there's a war over here," he said
listlessly.
"Ah," said Curfoot, "there won't be none."
"Why?"
"The Jews and bankers won't let these kinks mix it."
"That's right, too," nodded Brandes.
But Stull said nothing and his sour, pasty visage turned sourer. It
was the one possibility that disturbed him--the only fly in the
amber--the only mote that troubled his clairvoyance. Also, he was the
only man among the three who didn't think a thing was certain to
happen merely because he wanted it to happen.
There was another matter, too, which troubled him. Brandes was
unreliable. And who but little Stull should know how unreliable?
For Brandes had always been that. And now Stull knew him to be more
than that--knew him to be treacherous.
Whatever in Brandes had been decent, or had, blindly perhaps, aspired
toward decency, was now in abeyance. Something within him had gone to
smash since Minna Minti had struck him that night in the frightened
presence of Rue Carew.
And from that night, when he had lost the only woman who had ever
stirred in him the faintest aspiration to better things, the man had
gradually changed. Whatever in his nature had been unreliable became
treacherous; his stolidity became sullenness. A slow ferocity burned
within him; embers of a rage which no brooding ever quenched slumbered
red in his brain until his endless meditation became a monomania. And
his monomania was the ruin of this woman who had taken from him in the
very moment of consummation all that he had ever really loved in the
world--a thin, awkward, freckled, red-haired country girl, in whom,
for the first and only time in all his life, he saw the vague and
phantom promise of that trinity which he had never known--a wife, a
child, and a home.
He sat there by the car window glaring out of his dull green eyes at
the pleasant countryside, his thin lips tightening and relaxing on his
cigar.