Just as we were eating apple pie—­how Ben Davises and tragedy impinge upon each other!—­I noticed Sam looking with keen intentness at our quarry where they were seated at a table across the room.  The girl still wore the brown dress with lace collar and cuffs, and the veil drawn down to her nose.  The man bent over his plate, with his close cropped head held low.

“There’s a code,” I heard Sam say, either to me or to himself, “that won’t let you shoot a man in the company of a woman; but, by thunder, there ain’t one to keep you from killing a woman in the company of a man!”

And, quicker than my mind could follow his argument, he whipped a Colt’s automatic from under his left arm and pumped six bullets into the body that the brown dress covered—­the brown dress with the lace collar and cuffs and the accordion-plaited skirt.

The young person in the dark sack suit, from whose head and from whose life a woman’s glory had been clipped, laid her head on her arms stretched upon the table; while people came running to raise Ben Tatum from the floor in his feminine masquerade that had given Sam the opportunity to set aside, technically, the obligations of the code.

XI

SUITE HOMES AND THEIR ROMANCE

Few young couples in the Big-City-of-Bluff began their married existence with greater promise of happiness than did Mr. and Mrs. Claude Turpin.  They felt no especial animosity toward each other; they were comfortably established in a handsome apartment house that had a name and accommodations like those of a sleeping-car; they were living as expensively as the couple on the next floor above who had twice their income; and their marriage had occurred on a wager, a ferry-boat and first acquaintance, thus securing a sensational newspaper notice with their names attached to pictures of the Queen of Roumania and M. Santos-Dumont.

Turpin’s income was $200 per month.  On pay day, after calculating the amounts due for rent, instalments on furniture and piano, gas, and bills owed to the florist, confectioner, milliner, tailor, wine merchant and cab company, the Turpins would find that they still had $200 left to spend.  How to do this is one of the secrets of metropolitan life.

The domestic life of the Turpins was a beautiful picture to see.  But you couldn’t gaze upon it as you could at an oleograph of “Don’t Wake Grandma,” or “Brooklyn by Moonlight.”

You had to blink when looked at it; and you heard a fizzing sound just like the machine with a “scope” at the end of it.  Yes; there wasn’t much repose about the picture of the Turpins’ domestic life.  It was something like “Spearing Salmon in the Columbia River,” or “Japanese Artillery in Action.”

Every day was just like another; as the days are in New York.  In the morning Turpin would take bromo-seltzer, his pocket change from under the clock, his hat, no breakfast and his departure for the office.  At noon Mrs. Turpin would get out of bed and humour, put on a kimono, airs, and the water to boil for coffee.