第9章

"Gavegan!" exclaimed Hunt. "You picked a tough bird. Young man, you're off to a grand start--a charge of assault on an officer the very day they turn you out of jail."

Larry smiled. "Gavegan is a dirty one, but he'll make no charge of assault. He claims to be heavy-weight champion boxer of the Police Department. Put a fine crimp in his reputation, wouldn't it, if he admitted in public that he'd been knocked out by a fellow, bare-handed, supposed to be weak from prison life, forty pounds lighter.

He'd get the grand razoo all along the line. Oh, Gavegan will never let out a peep."

"He'll square things in some other way," said Hunt.

"I suppose he'll try," Larry responded carelessly. "Where's the first-aid room?"

Hunt showed him through the curtains. When he came out, Hunt, Maggie, and the Duchess were all engaged in getting the dinner upon the table.

Additional help would only be interference, so Larry's eyes wandered casually to the canvases standing in the shadows against the walls.

"Mr. Hunt," he remarked, "you seem to have earned a very real reputation of its sort in the neighborhood. Old Isaac downstairs told me you were crazy--said they called you 'Nuts'--said you were the worst painter that ever happened."

"Yeh, that's what they say," agreed Hunt.

"They certainly are awful, Larry," put in Maggie, coming to his side.

"Father thinks they are jokes, and father certainly knows pictures.

Just look at a few of them."

"Yeh, look at 'em and have a good laugh," invited Hunt.

Larry carried the portrait of the Duchess to beneath the swinging electric bulb and examined it closely. Maggie, at his shoulder, waited for his mirth; and Hunt regarded him with a sidelong gaze. But Larry did not laugh. He silently returned the picture, and then examined the portrait of Old Jimmie--then of Maggie--then of the Italian madonna, throned on her curbstone. He replaced this last and crossed swiftly to Hunt. Maggie watched this move in amazement.

Larry faced the big painter. His figure was tense, his features hard with suspicion. That moment one could understand why he was sometimes called "Terrible Larry"; just then he looked a devastating explosion that was still unexploded.

"What's your game down here, Hunt?" he demanded harshly.

"My game?" repeated the big painter. "I don't get you."

"Yes, you do! You're down here posing as a boob who smears up canvases!"

"What's wrong with that?"

"Only this: those are not crazy daubs. They're real pictures!"

"Eh!" exclaimed Hunt. Maggie stared in bewilderment at the two men.

Hunt spoke again. "What the dickens do you know about pictures? Old Jimmie, who's said to be a shark, thinks all these things are just comics."

"Jimmie only thinks a picture's good after a thousand press-agents have said it's good," Larry returned. "I studied at the Academy of Design for two years, till I learned I could never paint. But I know pictures."

"And you think mine are good?"

"Not in the popular manner--they're too original. But they're great.

And you're a great painter. And I want to know--"

"Hurray!" shouted Hunt, and flung an enthusiastic arm about Larry, and began to pound his back. "Oh, boy! Oh, boy!"

Larry wrenched himself free. "Cut that out. Then you admit you're a great painter?"

"Of course I'm a great painter!" shouted Hunt. "Who should know it better than I do?"

"Then what's a great painter doing down here? What's the game you're trying to put over, posing as--"

"Listen, son," Hunt grinned. "You've called me and I've got to show my cards. Only you mustn't ever tell--nor must Maggie; the Duchess doesn't talk, anyway. No need bothering you just now with a lot of details about myself. It's enough to say that people wouldn't pay me except when I did the usual pretty rot; no one believed in the other stuff I wanted to do. I wanted to get away from that bunch; I wanted to do real studies of human people, with their real nature showing through. So I beat it. Understand so far?"

"But why pose as a dub down here?"

"I never started the yarn that I was a dub. The people who looked at my work, and laughed, started that talk. I didn't shout out that I was a great artist for the mighty good reason that if I had, and had been believed, the people who posed for me either wouldn't have done it or would have been so self-conscious that they would have tried to look like some one else, and would never have shown me themselves at all.

Thinking me a joke, they just acted natural. Which, young man, is about all you need to know."

Maggie looked on breathlessly at the two men, bewildered by this new light in which Hunt was presented, and fascinated by the tense alertness of her hero, Larry.

Slowly Larry's tensity dissipated. "I don't know about the rest of your make-up," he said slowly, "but as a painter you're a whale."

"The rest of him's all right, too," put in the dry, unemotional voice of the Duchess. "Dinner's ready. Come on."

As they moved to the table Hunt clapped a big hand on Larry's shoulder. "And to think," he chuckled, "it took a crook fresh from Sing Sing to discover me as a great artist! You're clever, Larry--clever! Maggie, get the corkscrew into action and fill the glasses with the choicest vintage of H2O. A toast. Here's to Larry!"