“Don’t waste time on him,” I said. “I know the breed. They’re all the same. They have a fierce, possessive desire to own a woman, body and soul. He probably tried to tell you that his jealousy is only because he really doesn’t have the legal right to love and cherish you the way he wants, that if you were only his wife, he wouldn’t mind, that if you’d marry him, things would all be hunky-dory; and whenever you refuse, he goes out and gets drunk. He comes back and makes a scene, smashes glassware, and—”

“You sound as though you knew him,” she interrupted.

“I do, not as an individual, but as a type.”

“And your advice is to lay off?”

“Absolutely. Any time a man can’t show his strength of character by beating down his own faults, and then tries to get his self-respect back by smashing a dish, you want to lay off of him.”

“His particular yen is smashing glasses in a bar,” she said.

“You’re not going to marry him?”

“No.”

“He’s in Kansas City?”

“Yes—that is, he was when I left. If he knew where I was, he’d follow.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know, smash some dishes perhaps.”

“Those men are poison,” I said. “They’ll pay any price for the opportunity to assert themselves.”

“I know,” she said. “You read about them every day in the papers, the men who track down estranged wives, shoot them, and then commit suicide—the final gesture of futility—I hate it, and I’m afraid of it.”

I looked at her sharply. “And is it because of that you want the gun?”

She met my eyes then, and said, “Yes.”

“Do you want to buy one?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You have the money?”

“Yes.”

“It’s going to take about twenty-five dollars,” I said.

She opened her purse, took out two tens and a five, and gave them to me.

“I can’t get it right now,” I told her, “because we’re going to have to watch for that Durke girl to come out. I wonder why Bleatie was so positive she’d go somewhere to get in touch with Morgan Birks. You’d think she’d use the telephone.”

“Probably her line’s tapped,” Alma said.

“No, the police don’t know anything about her. If they did, they’d shadow her.”

“Well, she probably thinks the telephone’s tapped, or perhaps Morgan thinks so.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, “but then in real life things seldom do make—There she comes!”