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By Root 14557 0

she made a motion, quickly suppressed, to hang on to my arm. As I noticed that fact, the satisfaction which had been for the moment simple satisfaction, was again merely the wry and bilious satisfaction with which I had started out. And it stayed that kind, as I sat in the booth and looked at her face which was not smiling now and was showing the tensions and the tightness of the skin over the fine bone and showing, I suppose, the years that had gone since the summer when we sat in the roadster and she sang to Jackie-Bird, and promised never to let anybody hurt poor Jackie-Bird. Well, she had kept her promise, all right, for Jackie-Bird had flown away that summer, before the fall came, to some place with a better climate where nobody would ever hurt him, and he had never come back. At least, I had never seen him since.

Now she sat in the booth and told me, over our glasses of Coca Cola, what had happened in Adam’s apartment.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, when she got through.

“You know,” she said.

“You want me to make him stick to it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“It’ll be hard.”

She nodded

“It’ll be hard,” I said, “because he is acting perfectly crazy. The only thing I can prove to him is that if this Coffee bastard try to bribe him it only indicates that the job is on the level as long as Adam wants to keep it that way. It only indicates, furthermore, that somebody farther up the line had declined to take a bribe, too. It even indicates that Tiny Duffy is an honest man. Or,” I added, “hasn’t been able to deliver the goods.”

“You will try?” she asked.

“I’ll try,” I said, “but don’t get your hopes up. I can only prove to Adam what he would already know if he hadn’t gone crazy. He just has the high cantankerous moral shrinks. He does not like to play with the rough boys. He is afraid they might dirty his Lord Fauntleroy suit.”

“That’s no fair,” she burst out.

I shrugged, then said, “Well, I’ll try, anyway.”

“What will you do?”

“There is only one thing to do. I’ll go to Governor Stark, get him to agree to arrest Coffee on the grounds of attempted bribery of an official–Adam is an official, you know–and call on Adam to swear to the charges. If he’ll swear to them. That ought to make him see how things line up. That ought to show him the Boss will protect him. And–” to that point I had only been thinking of the Adam end but now my mind got to work on the possibilities of the situation–“it wouldn’t do the Boss any harm to hang a rap on Coffee. Particularly if he will squeal on the behind-guy. He might bust up Larson. And with Larson out, MacMurfee wouldn’t mean much. He might hang it on Coffee, too, if you–” And I stopped dead.

“If I what?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” I said, and felt the way you do when you are driving merrily across the drawbridge, and all at once the span starts up.

“What,” she demanded.

I looked into her level eyes and saw the way her jaw was set, and knew that I might as well say it. She would work on me till she had it. So I said it. “If you will testify,” I said.

“I’ll do it,” she said without hesitation.

I shook my head. “No,” I said.

“I’ll do it.”

“No, it won’t wash.”

“Why?”

“It just won’t. After all, you didn’t see anything.”

“I was there.”

“It would just be hearsay testimony. Absolutely that. It would never stand up.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know about those things. But I know this. I know that isn’t the reason you changed your mind. What made you change your mind?”

“You never have been on a witness stand. You don’t know what it is to have a mean, smart lawyer saw at you while you sweat.”

“I’ll do it,” she said.

“No.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Listen here,” I said, and shut my eyes and took the plunge off the end of the open drawbridge, “if you think Coffee’s lawyer wouldn’t have plenty on the ball you are crazy as Adam. He would be mean and he would be smart and he would not have one damned bit of fine old Southern chivalry.”

“You mean–” she began, and I knew from her face that she had caught the point.

“Exactly,” I said. “Nobody may know anything now, but when the fun