"You can show him if you feel like it," said Dick placidly.
The buffalo in the black sharp lines of the sketch wore Robison's little red eyes and shaggy mane of thick hair. It had Robison's slight deformity, magnified into an ordinary buffalo hump, and it waded up to its hocks in mud. Ogilvie folded it with remembrance of that night with Andree in Grange's back-parlour stirring in him.
"We'll see how Robison likes it," he said.
Slicker snatched at it and missed it.
"Oh, you make me tired, Ogilvie," he said. "Tear it up. What did you give it to him for, Dick? You know what Robison is."
This was precisely what Dick did not know. But if that sketch went where he intended he expected to find out. Robison was useless at present, but he might make a valuable enemy.
"Slicker hardly does justice to an artist's natural conceit," he said. "I want to know if Robison recognises it. Be sure you show him, Ogilvie."
"Certainly. But so sure as God made little apples I think he'll try to kill you for it," said Ogilvie; and presently he got up and went his way into the storm.
Dick drew another sheet towards him and went on sketching idly. And this time his song had the old stately, deep-sea tread:
"Good-night to you, Spanish ladies.
Good-night to you, ladies of Spain,"
and the face which he drew in the shadow of his curved hand was the face of Ducane's wife.
Parret's high nasal voice cut sharply into the song.
Dick glanced up at the German boy who puffed his little cigarette at the ceiling, unmoved by Parrett's wrath.
"That last epithet is at once your excuse and your condemnation," he said. "What have you been doing, Heinmann?"
"I say all clever men are immoral," explained the German boy. He contemplated Dick. "Are you moral?" he asked. "I think you do not look it."
