Keudell's retort, "and nothing came of it. And now I'm not going to waste words and I'm not going to waste time. I want those papers!"
Time, however, was the one thing which Sadie was insisting that he should waste. And closely as she watched her enemy, and that enemy watched her, one of her fingers was repeatedly and frantically playing on the button of her hidden push bell and she was silently praying for intervention, intervention in the form of Zuleika, or Wilsnach, or Kestner himself.
"Where'd yuh git a license to come rough-housin' through this ward and squealin' about papers yuh ain't even paid for yet?" she burst out, with all the insolence at her command.
Keudell, with his pale eyes fixed on Dorgan's face, quietly lifted his right hand from the side pocket where it had been resting.
"My license is right here!" he announced.
"Hully gee!" gasped Sadie. For Keudell's threat of force was no longer a veiled one. In his half-raised right hand he held a heavy-bodied automatic revolver. And he repeated his command of "I want those papers!" as he stepped closer to the strangely divergent pair opposing him.
