anger toward Clifford as she had felt two moments before.

[70]

CHAPTER VII NINA CORDOVA

Yes, he must prevent this marriage, he must block Loveman, he must find out Loveman’s plan, and he must do all quickly—but how? To warn the Mortons would achieve some of these ends; but he had a strong repugnance to this procedure. He would only play this as his last card.

Yes

Clifford thought of Slant-Face; but he realized that Slant-Face would probably have no influence with his sister, and possibly the ex-pickpocket might even regard the affair from Mary’s viewpoint. Also he thought of her Uncle Joe; but the same objection held true regarding him, and also the width of the continent made him unavailable. As for Commissioner Thorne, he could not be of service in the present stage of affairs. And then Clifford thought of Uncle George. Uncle George might possibly give suggestions, for Uncle George knew as much about the pleasure life (and what lay beneath it) of Broadway and of Broadway’s closest territorial relative, Fifth Avenue between the Waldorf and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as any other hundred men in New York put together.

An hour after leaving Mary, Clifford sat in the Grand Alcazar restaurant, looking into the bland,[71] genial, cunning, loose-skinned old face. He had just finished telling Uncle George of his discovery of the whereabouts of Mary Regan and the other events of the day.

[71]

The old man regarded Clifford with meditative, puckered gaze—a gaze of somewhat peculiar effect, begotten by his lack of eyebrows and eyelashes. “Son,” he began slowly, “the thing that stands out in this chunk of vers libre you’ve been handing me, is the fact that you’re so stuck on that little dame Mary Regan—”

“Let’s leave me, and what I may think of her, out of it,” put in Clifford.

“Don’t interrupt, son. You ask me a thing and you’ve got to let me spiel along in my own way”—which, indeed, was one of the difficulties not to be avoided in consulting Uncle George. “Now, you listen to me, son, and you’ll hear something out of the original book out of which old Solomon and those other wise guys that have been playing big time steady for three or four thousand years swiped all their good gags. Son, you’re 

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