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Dorrigan was very nervous and ill at ease. Carl laughed with relish. "What's the trouble?" he demanded.
There was some slight rustle of greenish paper in the handshake. "I'm mighty grateful," said Carl. "That paper cost me a couple of hours of laborious preparation. It's a duplicate, Hunch, for the purpose of decoy. The original's in safe deposit." The closing of the outer door betokened the departure of Mr. Dorrigan.
The doorbell rang as he finished, and dropping the flute back into his pocket, he rang for some whiskey and cigars for the entertainment of Mr. Dorrigan, who presently appeared, at the heels of a servant, twirling his hat with a nonchalant ease much too elaborate and at variance with the look in his good eye to be genuine. "'Lo!" said Hunch uncomfortably.
Cautiously raising the robe Hunch Dorrigan stared with interest at the prisoner he was inconspicuously to assist into the empty town house of the Westfalls. From a garish dream of startling unpleasantness, Philip Poynter stirred and opened his eyes. "Well, now," he mused uncomfortably, "this is more like it! This is the sort of dream to have!
He begged Carl to give him an immediate opportunity of squaring himself, for he had telephoned the house so frequently of late that the butler had grown insulting. Mr. Dorrigan added that he hoped Mr. Granberry's wholly justified wrath had somewhat abated, but that for purposes of initial communication the telephone had seemed more prudent. He was plainly relieved at the answer.
Hunch Dorrigan was stealing catlike down the stairs, his bloated vicious face leering threateningly at her over the railing. "You old she-wolf!" roared that elegant young man. "Where's His Nibs?" Aunt Agatha moistened her dry lips and, gurgling fearfully, fainted. When at length she became conscious again. Hunch, glowering fiercely, was returning from a futile chase.
Dorrigan desperately admitted that some of the time between the escape of His Nibs and Carl's departure for the farm had been spent in panic-stricken remorse and dread some in the hospital due to an altercation with Link Murphy, who for reasons not immediately apparent wished jealously to obliterate his other eye.
Such a look had flashed at times in the bloated face of Hunch Dorrigan, in the eyes of young Allan Carmody here at the farm, and in early manhood when Carl had lazily set a college by the ears in the eyes of Philip Poynter.