She reached the corner just as the frame closed against her, and with one small foot on the clutch pedal and the other on the brake, she leaned back and scanned the crowd.  Abruptly she leaned and beckoned, saw that her signal went unregarded, and gave three short but terrific blasts of her Klaxon.  Five hundred and forty-nine persons reacted sharply to the sound and sent startled glances her way.  The traffic cop whirled and looked, the motorman on the car waiting beside her leaned far out and craned, and the conductor grasped both handrails and took a step down that he might see the better.

Mary V ignored these trifles.  Bland, for whom she had meant it, jumped and turned a pale, startled pair of eyes her way, and to him she beckoned imperiously.  He hesitated, glanced this way and that, making a quick mental decision.  Mary V had once been candidly tempted to shoot him and had dallied with the temptation to the point of cocking her sixshooter and aiming it directly at him.  She looked now quite capable of repeating the performance and of completing what she had merely started last summer.  He went to the edge of the curb, obeying her expectant stare.  The expectant stare continued to transfix him, and he stepped off the curb and close to the Bear Cat that was growling in its throat.

“Bland Halliday, where have you been, for gracious sake?  And where’s Johnny?”

“I ain’t been anywhere but here—­and I wisht I knowed where Johnny was.  I—­”

“Bland Halliday, you tell me instantly!  Where’s Johnny?”

“Honest, I don’t know.  I been looking for him myself, and—­”

“Bland Halliday, do you want to be torn limb from limb, right here on the public street before everybody?  I want to know where Johnny is, and I want to know now.”

“Aw, f’r cat’s sake!  I ain’t saw Johnny f’r three weeks—­not since the night we got here.  I been looking—­”

Behind them sounded a succession of impatient honks that extended almost to Seventh Street.  The traffic cop had blown his whistle, the street car had clanged warning and gone on.  The truck had shaved past Mary V and the Ford had followed.  Other cars coming up behind had mistaken the Bear Cat’s inaction for closed traffic and had stopped.  Others had stopped behind them; then two other street cars slid up and blocked the way around.

Mary V was quite oblivious to all this.  She was glaring at the one link between herself and Johnny Jewel.  She was bitterly regretting the fact that she had no gun with which to scare Bland into telling the truth, and she was wondering what other means of coercion would prove effective.  Bland knew where Johnny was, of course.  He was lying, for some reason—­probably because he had the habit and couldn’t stop.

Bland kept an eye on Mary V’s right hand.  He suspected a gun, and when, in involuntary obedience to the frantic honkings behind her, she let her hand drop to the gear lever, Bland turned to flee.