Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Hm.”

She looked quickly at his face, caught anxiety stamped there plainly in the faintest depression of the mouth’s corners.

“It’s all the same to me,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “’Tisn’t my yacht. I don’t mind going for a coupla hours’ cruise. I’ll even lend you that book so you’ll have something to read on the revenue boat that takes you up to Sing Sing.”

He laughed scornfully.

“If that’s advice you needn’t bother. This is part of a plan arranged before I ever knew this yacht existed. If it hadn’t been this one it’d have been the next one we passed anchored along the coast.”

“Who are you?” demanded Ardita suddenly. “And what are you?”

“You’ve decided not to go ashore?”

“I never even faintly considered it.”

“We’re generally known,” he said, “all seven of us, as Curtis Carlyle and his Six Black Buddies, late of the Winter Garden and the Midnight Frolic.”

“You’re singers?”

“We were until to-day. At present, due to those white bags you see there, we’re fugitives from justice, and if the reward offered for our capture hasn’t by this time reached twenty thousand dollars I miss my guess.”