Daisy Herself. Will E. Ingersoll
that brings a girl sixteen years old to a hotel. Go down and phone for the police, if you feel like it! I know who they'll take back with them when they come, and it won't be me. And I'll tell you something more, Mr. Smart Man: If you're not out of here in the next three minutes or less, I'll phone for the constable. It makes me sick to look at you. I want to go and wash my mouth, too. It'll take a good many washings to make it feel as clean as it did before you touched it. Get away from here!"
"Well," Beatty growled, after a moment, as a distant step down the hall portended the coming of one of the hotel staff, probably attracted by the sound of the raised voices and scuffling, "keep the money, then, you blamed nickel's worth o' nothing. I'll get the worth of it out o' you some other way, yet—you watch me! There's goin' to come a time when you'll need me, an' you'd better fasten onto this," he took a card from his pocket and tossed it down on the settee. "Till then, I'll bid you 'good-day'."
Therewith—in his intense self-reverence, half-expecting to be called back before he reached the street-door—Mr. Frederick S. Beatty turned on his heel and stalked out.
But Daisy did not call him back. Neither, be it said, did she hasten to wash her mouth. As the slam of the door downstairs gave ostentatious notice of Beatty's exit, she moved to the window, watching him up the sidewalk with an odd, half-maternal look.
"That call-down may do you some good, Mr. Naughty man," she murmured; "you've had too easy a time with girls—that's what ails you, principally."
CHAPTER III. The Maid and the Clerk.
"'Usbands are hodd duckies," said a voice, accompanying the pat and shake of one of the cushions on the settee where Beatty and Daisy had been sitting. "So they har."
The remark suggested experience, and contained an obvious invitation to confidences. Daisy, her eyes still thoughtful, turned and beheld a hectic sylph, with an insinuating expression and a feather-duster. Hair of an elusive hue was gathered into a cone at the back of her head. At the base of this cone, a piece of white cambric was pinned like a saddle. Frank lengths of mature, brown-stockinged leg, in contour like exclamation-marks, rushed upward, as it were, in hot pursuit of a skirt-hem which they did not succeed in overtaking until it had nearly reached the sylph's knee. She had a long chin, and lips that were pursed, not into a line, but into a kind of mincing rosette.
"Ar, ee—yes—s", she pursued. The way she held her mouth made "yes" a hard word to get through that puckered aperture. She undulated like an ostrich-neck for a moment, then came to attention, with her head on one side, and a hand primping cautiously at her coiffure. Her eyes had fixed themselves on Daisy's "ring-finger", innocent of any certifying circlet of gold.
"'Usbands har queer," she repeated; her glance, after a short sharp sketch of Daisy's figure, coming to rest on the girl's face, "arn't they?"
Daisy Nixon had knocked around quite a little in Toddburn district, and was familiar with most local types of both sexes; but the bearer of the feather-duster refused to be classified offhand in her mind. Cautiously, and with the feeling of one patting a strange dog, she responded:
"Are they?"
"Maybe, an' maybe not," said the other, enigmatically, "you carn't never say. Arsk them as knows." With this, the sylph transferred her glance from Daisy's face to Daisy's finger; then from finger to face; then back to finger; then back to face; and so on, ostentatiously, three or four times. Her cheeks, that, when she came into the room looked as though she had been running hard, gave still the same impression; though Daisy noticed that the rest of her face was a cool and floury white.
There came a ring, at this moment, from the telephone in the hall. Duster and all, Daisy's vis-a-vis, moving with a queer lateral toss of her hips that made their obvious breadth more than ever noticeable, serpentined to answer the call. Returning after a moment, she said:
"Bob—er—Mr. Markey, 'e wants to see you, in the office. Straightaway, 'e says."
Wondering a little at this peremptory summons, Daisy went downstairs. She stepped a little diffidently across the dingy rotunda to the counter. There she found, leaning with an elbow on the edge of the register, a man slightly older than Beatty. He had a vest with do-funnys on the pockets; a coat broad-striped, snug at the waist, sharp-lapelled, and tight-shouldered. He had a face dappled with red. He was newly-barbered—shaved to the blood.
He did not turn broadside-on as Daisy drew near, but spoke to her from sidewise, sliding his glances out of the corner of his eye and his words out of the corner of his mouth:
"Got nothin' except hand-luggage, lady, huh?"
Daisy looked a little puzzled.
"Naw trunks, I mean," elucidated Mr. Markey, nasally; "get me?"
"N-no, there's no trunks; just the two grips."
"Just the one grip," corrected her catechist, dramatically, fetching up Daisy's old telescope-bag from under the counter; "just this—see?"
Daisy looked at it: Mr. Markey eyed her, tangently.
"Ketch the point?" he said, after a moment, "we got no secur'tee for your board bill. You pay in advance—see?"
Remembering Beatty's purse, still in her possession, Daisy, a little flustered by Mr. Markey's abruptness, reached into the front of her blouse. The purse was still there, nestling against her waist-band; and, with a little thrill of self-congratulation at the initiative that had brought the pocket-book into her possession, Daisy drew it out, rested it on the counter, and made to slip off the elastic.
As she did this, she felt Markey's eyes on her, and saw him slowly pivot round. She got a gust of stale cigar-breath and a smell of bay rum as he leaned close.
"Where's the little weddin'-ring, honey?" he said, softly; "did Freddie forget? Naughtee, naugh-tee?" His hand, the finger-ends, like Beatty's, yellowed with cigarette-stains, came over, moist and disgusting, and paddled hers.
Daisy jerked her hands away, leaving Beatty's purse momentarily on the counter-edge. Markey coolly picked up the purse and slipped it into his pocket.
"Yoi, yoi!" he mocked, shrugging, with spread palms, "Freddie gets the little purse back, after all. 'Leave it to Brother Bobby', I says to him when he went out."
Leaning forward on his elbows, and continuing inanely to flap his palms—a performance in which Mr. Markey evidently imagined lay the very quintessence of humor—the hotel clerk grinned his relish into the face of Daisy Nixon. Then, suddenly changing his expression, he brought his fists down on the counter with a bang, thrust his chin out toward her, shot out an arm, with forefinger extended, in the direction of the door, and exclaimed:
"Now beat it! Beat it, before I call a cop!"
"Just half a minute". The voice, with a thunderous under-purr of deep-lunged power, spoke up from behind Daisy. She turned—and looked into the keen old eyes, blue as a morning sky, of Jim Hogle, the bus-driver. His chin, with its sandy stubble, moved up and down within the sweeping triangle of his moustache, and the leathery muscles of his jaw rippled as he rolled his tobacco in his cheek.
"What's amiss?" he said, taking Daisy's two hands in his, in his paternal way.
"Hey, what's the idea, what's th' idea?" the voice was that of Mr. Robert Markey; "who the hell told you to horn in?"
Old Man Hogle did not even look toward the speaker. "Did ye give yon other feller his walkin'-ticket, like I told y'?" he enquired, of Daisy. His broad, team-curbing hand, the palm rough as a nutmeg-grater, closed about her fingers with an unconscious strength of constriction that made the girl wince a little.
Daisy Nixon was thinking rapidly. She had been neither humbled nor daunted by Mr. Markey's attitude. In fact, the point uppermost in her mind, at the moment, was how to get back Beatty's purse—less because