I said, “Sure.”

The man in the road took a step toward me, moved his hand as before, and growled, “Scram, you.”

I got out of my car. The man in the road had started toward me when another man's voice came from the sedan, a harsh warning voice. “Go easy, Tony. It's Jack Bye.” The sedan door swung open and the girl jumped out.

Tony said, “Oh!” and his feet shuffled uncertainly on the road; but when he saw the girl making for my car he cried indignantly at her, “Listen, you can't ride to town with —”

She was in my roadster by then. “Good night,” she said.

He faced me, shook his head stubbornly, began, “I'll be damned if I'll let —”

I hit him. The knockdown was fair enough, because I hit him hard, but I think he could have got up again if he had wanted to. I gave him a little time, then asked the fellow in the sedan, “All right with you?” I still could not see him.

“He'll be all right,” he replied quickly. “I'll take care of of him all right.”

“Thanks.” I climbed into my car beside the girl. The rain I had been trying to get to town ahead of was beginning to fall. A coupe with a man and a woman in it passed us going toward town. We followed the coupe across the bridge.

The girl said, “This is awfully kind of you. I wasn't in any danger back there, but it was—nasty.”

“They wouldn't be dangerous,” I said, “but they would be—nasty.”

“You know them?”

“No.”

“But they knew you. Tony Forrest and Fred Barnes.” When I did not say anything, she added, “They were afraid of you.”

“I'm a desperate character.”

She laughed. “And pretty nice of you, too, tonight. I wouldn't've gone with either of them alone, but I thought with two of them …” She turned up the collar of her coat. “It's raining in on me.”

I stopped the roadster again and hunted for the curtain that belonged on her side of the car. “So your name's Jack Bye,” she said while I was snapping it on.

“And yours is Helen Warner.”

“How'd you know?” She had straightened her hat.

“I've seen you around.” I finished attaching the curtain and got back in.

“Did you know who I was when I called to you?” she asked when we were moving again.

“Yes.”

“It was silly of me to go out with them like that.”

“You're shivering.”

“It's chilly.”

I said I was sorry my flask was empty.

We had turned into the western end of Hellman Avenue. It was four minutes past ten by the clock in front of the jewelry store on the corner of Laurel Street. A policeman in a black rubber coat was leaning against the clock. I did not know enough about perfumes to know the name of hers.

She said, “I'm chilly. Can't we stop somewhere and get a drink?”

“Do you really want to?” My voice must have puzzled her; she turned her head quickly to peer at me in the dim

light.

“I'd like to,” she said, “unless you're in a hurry.”

“No. We could go to Mack's. It's only three or four blocks from here, but—it's a nigger joint.”

She laughed. “All I ask is that I don't get poisoned.”

“You won't, but you're sure you want to go?”

“Certainly.” She exaggerated her shivering. “I'm cold. It's early.”

Toots Mack opened his door for us. I could tell by the politeness with which he bowed his round bald black head and said, “Good evening, sir; good evening, madam,” that he wished we had gone some place else, but I was not especially interested in how he felt about it. I said, “Hello, Toots; how are you this evening?” too cheerfully.

There were only a few customers in the place. We went to the table in the corner farthest from the piano. Suddenly she was staring at me, her eyes, already very blue, becoming very round.

“I thought you could see in the car,” I began.

“How'd you get that scar?” she asked, interrupting me.

She sat down.

“That.” I put a hand to my cheek. “Fight—couple of years ago. You ought to see the one on my chest.”

“We'll have to go swimming some time,” she said gayly.

“Please sit down and don't keep me waiting for my drink.”

“Are you sure you —”

She began to chant, keeping time with her fingers on the table, “I want a drink, I want a drink, I want a drink.” Her mouth was small with full lips and it curved up without growing wider when she smiled.

We ordered drinks. We talked too fast. We made jokes and laughed too readily at them. We asked questions—about the name of the perfume she used was one —and paid too much or no attention to the answers. And Toots looked glumly at us from behind the bar when he thought we were hot looking at him. It was all pretty bad.

We had another drink and I said, “Well, let's slide along.”

She was nice about seeming neither too anxious to go nor to stay. The ends of her pale blonde hair curled up over the edge of her hat in back.

At the door I said, “Listen, there's a taxi-stand around the corner. You won't mind if I don't take you home?”

She put a hand on my arm. “I do mind. Please —” The street was badly lighted. Her face was like a child's. She took her.hand off my arm. “But if you'd rather . . .”

“I think I'd rather.”

She said slowly, “I like you, Jack Bye, and I'm awfully grateful for —”

I said, “Aw, that's all right,” and we shook hands and I went back into the speakeasy.

Toots was still behind the bar. He came up to where I stood. “You oughtn't to do that to me,” he said, shaking his head mournfully.

“I know. I'm sorry.”

“You oughtn't to do it to yourself,” he went on just as sadly. “This ain't Harlem, boy, and if old Judge Warner finds out his daughter's running around with you and coming in here he can make it plenty tough for both of us. I like you, boy, but you got to remember it don't make no difference how light your skin is or how many colleges you went to, you're still nigger.”

I said, “Well, what do you suppose I want to be? A Chinaman?”

“THE TROUBLE with this country,” Old Man Covey unexpectedly exploded, emphasizing his words with repeated beats of a gnarled forefinger on the newspaper he had been reading, “is that the courts have got a stranglehold on it! Law? There ain't no law! There's courts and there's judges, and this thing you call the law is a weapon they use to choke human enterprise—to discourage originality and progress!”

The portion of the morning paper upon which the old man's assault was concentrated, I saw with difficulty, held the report of a decision of the Supreme Court in connection with some labor difficulties in the West. Old Man Covey, I knew, couldn't be personally interested in either side of the dispute. He had as little to do with capital as with labor, which was very little. For eight years now—since the day when a street preacher had turned “Big-dog” Covey from the ways of crime, to become plain John Covey and, later, Old Man Covey—he had subsisted upon the benevolence of a son-in-law.

His interest in this case was, then, purely academic. But his attitude was undoubtedly tinged by his earlier experience with the criminal courts, which had been more than superficial, and I suspected that some especially bitter memory had engendered this outburst.

So I rolled another cigarette and led him gently along the road of argumentation—the most direct path, I had learned, to the interior of his contrary old mind.

“Being a beak,” I said, using the vernacular term for judge in an attempt to do all I could to stir up the portions of his remembrance that had to do with his days of youth and lawlessness, “is a tough job. Laws are complicated and puzzling, and it isn't easy to straighten them out so that they fit particular cases. Most of the beaks do very well, I think.”

“You think so, do you?” the old scoundrel snarled at me. “Well, let me tell you, sonny, you don't know a damned thing about it! I could tell you stories about beaks and their ways that would knock your eye out!”