Spade winked at his partner.
Miles Archer came forward to stand at a corner of the desk. While the girl looked at her bag he looked at her. His little brown eyes ran their bold appraising gaze from her lowered face to her feet and up to her face again. Then he looked at Spade and made a silent whistling mouth of appreciation.
Spade lifted two fingers from the arm of his chair in a brief warning gesture and said:
“We shouldn’t have any trouble with it. It’s simply a matter of having a man at the hotel this evening to shadow him away when he leaves, and shadow him until he leads us to your sister. If she comes with him, and you persuade her to return with you, so much the better. Otherwise—if she doesn’t want to leave him after we’ve found her—well, we’ll find a way of managing that.”
Archer said: “Yeh.” His voice was heavy, coarse.
Miss Wonderly looked up at Spade, quickly, puckering her forehead between her eyebrows.
“Oh, but you must be careful!” Her voice shook a little, and her lips shaped the words with nervous jerkiness. “I’m deathly afraid of him, of what he might do. She’s so young and his bringing her here from New York is such a serious—Mightn’t he—mightn’t he do—something to her?”
Spade smiled and patted the arms of his chair.
“Just leave that to us,” he said. “We’ll know how to handle him.”
“But mightn’t he?” she insisted.