If a gun had burst in Jinnie's face, she could have been no more alarmed. She was frozen to silence, and every former fear her father had given life to almost three years before, beset her once more, only with many times the amount of vigor. Nevertheless, she gave back look for look, challenge for challenge, while her fingers locked and interlocked. Her uncle, who had sent her father to his grave, the man who wanted her money, who desired her own death!
Then her eyes slowly took on a tragic expression. She knew then she was destined to encounter the tragedy of Morse's terrific vengeance, and no longer wondered why her father had succumbed to his force. He stood looking at her, his gaze taking in the young form avidiously.
"You're the most beautiful girl in the world," he averred presently.
Jinnie's blue eyes narrowed angrily. However, in spite of her rage, she was terribly frightened. An instinct of self-preservation told her to put on a bold, aggressive front.
"Give me that key and let me go," she insisted, with an upward toss of her head.
She walked to the door and shook it vigorously. Morse followed her and brought her brutally back to the center of the room.
"Not so fast," he grated. "Don't ever do that again! I've been hunting you for almost three years.... Sit down, I said."
"I won't!" cried Jinnie, recklessly. "I won't! You can't keep me here. My friends'll find me."
The man hazarded a laugh.
"What friends?" he queried.
Jinnie thought quickly. What friends? She had no friends just then, and because she knew she was dependent upon him for her very life, she listened in despair as he threw a truth at her.
"The only friends you have're out of business! Lafe Grandoken will be electrocuted for murder----"
The hateful thing he had just said and the insistence in it maddened her. She covered her face with her hands and uttered a low cry.
"And Theodore King is in the hospital," went on Morse, mercilessly. "It'll do no good for you to remember him."
She was too normally alive not to express the loving heart outraged within her.
"I shall love him as long as I live," she shivered between her fingers.
"Hell of a lot of good it'll do you," grunted the man coarsely.
Keen anxiety empowered her to raise an anguished face.
"You want my money----" she hesitated. "Well, you can have it.... You want it, don't you?"
Her girlish helplessness made Morse feel that he was without heart or dignity, but he thought of his little boy and of how this girl was keeping from him the means to institute a search for the child, and his desire for vengeance kindled to glowing fires of hate. He remembered that, steadily of late, he had grown to detest the whole child-world because of his own sorrow, and nodded acquiescence, supplementing the nod with a harsh: "And, by God, I'm going to have it, too!"