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The purring perfection of Hogarty's discourse was enticing. The absurd simplicity of his plan, which he admitted must, after all, be credited to the astuteness of Dennison himself, was more than alluring. But that smile was the quintessence of hypnotic flattery. It savored of a delightful intimacy which Jesse Hogarty accorded to few men.
And he began to chuckle; he sat and shook with muffled spasms of absolute joy as the thing became more and more vivid with each new thought. Even Hogarty's answering smile, coming from reluctant lips, had in it something of sympathetic mirth. "That's just what I am thinking," he said. "Just that! It's what I meant when I said I was going to pay him with his own coin.
And Young Denny continued to advance continued, and left in the rear a neatly defined trail where the heavy nails of his shoes marred the sacred sheen of that floor. Within arm's reach of the table he stopped, his eyes flitting questioningly from Hogarty's totally inscrutable face to the tense interest and enjoyment in Bobby Ogden's features, and back again.
Even since the conference in Hogarty's little office, when he had agreed to the ex-lightweight's plan, it had been vexing him, no nearer solution than it had been that day when he assured Hogarty that there was more behind young Denny's eagerness to meet Jed Conway than the prize-money could account for.
He sat twisted about in his chair, staring wide-eyed at the figure that had pushed open the street door and was now surveying the whole room with an astonishingly calm attention to detail. Ogden was staring, oblivious to everything else, and with real cause, for the figure that had hesitated on the threshold was like no other that had ever drifted into Hogarty's place before.
And he fidgeted constantly in the face of Hogarty's happy deliberation, stretching his heliotrope silk-clad arms and tapping flat, heel-less rubber-soled shoes on the floor beneath the table in a fashion that would have irritated any but the blandly unconscious man across the table from him to a state of violence.
"I believe that you said some one sent you. You you did not mention the name?" Denny leaned over and picked up his coat from a chair beside the bench, searching the pockets until he found the card which the plump, brown-clad newspaper man had given him. Without a word he reached out and put it in Hogarty's hands. It bore Jesse Hogarty's Fourteenth Street address across its face.
I I hit him pretty hard, Flash and do you know what he done? Well, he blinked. He blinked at me. I never hit any man harder." Hogarty's face had lost a little of its inscrutability. He flashed one sharp glance across at Young Denny in the other corner as he stepped back out of the ring and his frown deepened a little after that brief scrutiny.
"But, you see, I kind of thought if I just told you first that I wanted to see if I had any chance, you wouldn't make any allowances for me because I " Hogarty's second nod which cut him short was the quintessence of crisp satisfaction. "I understand," he cut in. "Perfectly! And quite right quite right!"
That same light of savage hope and cruelly calculating enmity, all so strangely mixed with a persistent doubt, which Young Denny had seen flare up in the ex-lightweight's eyes a little while before, back in the dressing-room, began to creep once more across Hogarty's face. "You know how long I've been waiting for one to come along, Chub," he went on, almost hoarsely.
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