I looked over the room casually, while McKnight ordered the meal. Then
my attention was attracted to the table next to ours. Two people were
sitting there, so deep in conversation that they did not notice us. The
woman’s face was hidden under her hat, as she traced the pattern of the
cloth mechanically with her fork. But the man’s features stood out
clear in the light of the candles on the table. It was Bronson!
“He shows the strain, doesn’t he?” McKnight said, holding up the wine
list as if he read from it. “Who’s the woman?”
“Search me,” I replied, in the same way.
When the chicken came, I still found myself gazing now and then at the
abstracted couple near me. Evidently the subject of conversation was
unpleasant. Bronson was eating little, the woman not at all. Finally he
got up, pushed his chair back noisily, thrust a bill at the waiter and
stalked out.
The woman sat still for a moment; then, with an apparent resolution to
make the best of it, she began slowly to eat the meal before her.
But the quarrel had taken away her appetite, for the mixture in our
chafing-dish was hardly ready to serve before she pushed her chair back
a little and looked around the room.
I caught my first glimpse of her face then, and I confess it startled
me. It was the tall, stately woman of the Ontario, the woman I had last
seen cowering beside the road, rolling pebbles in her hand, blood
streaming from a cut over her eye. I could see the scar now, a little
affair, about an inch long, gleaming red through its layers of powder.
And then, quite unexpectedly, she turned and looked directly at me.
After a minute’s uncertainty, she bowed, letting her eyes rest on mine
with a calmly insolent stare. She glanced at McKnight for a moment,
then back to me. When she looked away again I breathed easier.
“Who is it?” asked McKnight under his breath.
“Ontario.” I formed it with my lips rather than said it. McKnight’s
eyebrows went up and he looked with increased interest at the
black-gowned figure.
I ate little after that. The situation was rather bad for me, I began
to see. Here was a woman who could, if she wished, and had any motive
for so doing, put me in jail under a capital charge. A word from her to
the police, and polite surveillance would become active interference.
Then, too, she could say that she had seen me, just after the wreck,
with a young woman from the murdered man’s car, and thus probably bring
Alison West into the case.
It is not surprising, then, that I ate little. The woman across seemed
in no hurry to go. She loitered over a demi-tasse, and that finished,
sat with her elbow on the table, her chin in her hand, looking darkly
at the changing groups in the room.
The fun at the table where the college boys sat began to grow a little
noisy; the fat man, now a purplish shade, ambled away behind his slim
companion; the newspaper woman pinned on her business-like hat and
stalked out. Still the woman at the next table waited.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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