Project Gutenberg's Gallegher and Other Stories, by Richard Harding Davis
#34 in our series by Richard Harding Davis

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: Gallegher and Other Stories

Author: Richard Harding Davis

Release Date: June, 2004 [EBook #5956]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on September 29, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GALLEGHER AND OTHER STORIES ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.




GALLEGHER
AND OTHER STORIES

BY

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

_With Illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson_

COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS




TO
MY MOTHER




CONTENTS


GALLEGHER: A NEWSPAPER STORY

A WALK UP THE AVENUE

MY DISREPUTABLE FRIEND, MR. RAEGEN

THE OTHER WOMAN

THE TRAILER FOR ROOM NO. 8

"THERE WERE NINETY AND NINE"

THE CYNICAL MISS CATHERWAIGHT

VAN BIBBER AND THE SWAN-BOATS

VAN BIBBER'S BURGLAR

VAN BIBBER AS BEST MAN




GALLEGHER
A Newspaper Story

[Illustration: "Why, it's Gallegher!" said the night editor.]


We had had so many office-boys before Gallegher came among us that
they had begun to lose the characteristics of individuals, and became
merged in a composite photograph of small boys, to whom we applied the
generic title of "Here, you"; or "You, boy."

We had had sleepy boys, and lazy boys, and bright, "smart" boys, who
became so familiar on so short an acquaintance that we were forced to
part with them to save our own self-respect.

They generally graduated into district-messenger boys, and
occasionally returned to us in blue coats with nickel-plated buttons,
and patronized us.

But Gallegher was something different from anything we had experienced
before. Gallegher was short and broad in build, with a solid, muscular
broadness, and not a fat and dumpy shortness. He wore perpetually on
his face a happy and knowing smile, as if you and the world in general
were not impressing him as seriously as you thought you were, and his
eyes, which were very black and very bright, snapped intelligently at
you like those of a little black-and-tan terrier.

All Gallegher knew had been learnt on the streets; not a very good
school in itself, but one that turns out very knowing scholars. And
Gallegher had attended both morning and evening sessions. He could not
tell you who the Pilgrim Fathers were, nor could he name the thirteen
original States, but he knew all the officers of the twenty-second
police district by name, and he could distinguish the clang of a fire-
engine's gong from that of a patrol-wagon or an ambulance fully two
blocks distant. It was Gallegher who rang the alarm when the Woolwich
Mills caught fire, while the officer on the beat was asleep, and it
was Gallegher who led the "Black Diamonds" against the "Wharf Rats,"
when they used to stone each other to their hearts' content on the
coal-wharves of Richmond.

I am afraid, now that I see these facts written down, that Gallegher
was not a reputable character; but he was so very young and so very
old for his years that we all liked him very much nevertheless. He
lived in the extreme northern part of Philadelphia, where the cotton-
and woollen-mills run down to the river, and how he ever got home
after leaving the _Press_ building at two in the morning, was one
of the mysteries of the office. Sometimes he caught a night car, and
sometimes he walked all the way, arriving at the little house, where
his mother and himself lived alone, at four in the morning.
Occasionally he was given a ride on an early milk-cart, or on one of
the newspaper delivery wagons, with its high piles of papers still
damp and sticky from the press. He knew several drivers of "night
hawks"--those cabs that prowl the streets at night looking for belated
passengers--and when it was a very cold morning he would not go home
at all, but would crawl into one of these cabs and sleep, curled up on
the cushions, until daylight.

Besides being quick and cheerful, Gallegher possessed a power of
amusing the _Press's_ young men to a degree seldom attained by the
ordinary mortal. His clog-dancing on the city editor's desk, when that
gentleman was up-stairs fighting for two more columns of space, was
always a source of innocent joy to us, and his imitations of the
comedians of the variety halls delighted even the dramatic critic,
from whom the comedians themselves failed to force a smile.

But Gallegher's chief characteristic was his love for that element of
news generically classed as "crime." Not that he ever did anything
criminal himself. On the contrary, his was rather the work of the
criminal specialist, and his morbid interest in the doings of all
queer characters, his knowledge of their methods, their present
whereabouts, and their past deeds of transgression often rendered him
a valuable ally to our police reporter, whose daily feuilletons were
the only portion of the paper Gallegher deigned to read.

In Gallegher the detective element was abnormally developed. He had
shown this on several occasions, and to excellent purpose.

Once the paper had sent him into a Home for Destitute Orphans which
was believed to be grievously mismanaged, and Gallegher, while playing
the part of a destitute orphan, kept his eyes open to what was going
on around him so faithfully that the story he told of the treatment
meted out to the real orphans was sufficient to rescue the unhappy
little wretches from the individual who had them in charge, and to
have the individual himself sent to jail.

Gallegher's knowledge of the aliases, terms of imprisonment, and
various misdoings of the leading criminals in Philadelphia was almost
as thorough as that of the chief of police himself, and he could tell
to an hour when "Dutchy Mack" was to be let out of prison, and could
identify at a glance "Dick Oxford, confidence man," as "Gentleman Dan,
petty thief."

There were, at this time, only two pieces of news in any of the
papers. The least important of the two was the big fight between the
Champion of the United States and the Would-be Champion, arranged to
take place near Philadelphia; the second was the Burrbank murder,
which was filling space in newspapers all over the world, from New
York to Bombay.

Richard F. Burrbank was one of the most prominent of New York's
railroad lawyers; he was also, as a matter of course, an owner of much
railroad stock, and a very wealthy man. He had been spoken of as a
political possibility for many high offices, and, as the counsel for a
great railroad, was known even further than the great railroad itself
had stretched its system.

At six o'clock one morning he was found by his butler lying at the
foot of the hall stairs with two pistol wounds above his heart. He was
quite dead. His safe, to which only he and his secretary had the keys,
was found open, and $200,000 in bonds, stocks, and money, which had
been placed there only the night before, was found missing. The
secretary was missing also. His name was Stephen S. Hade, and his name
and his description had been telegraphed and cabled to all parts of
the world. There was enough circumstantial evidence to show, beyond
any question or possibility of mistake, that he was the murderer.

It made an enormous amount of talk, and unhappy individuals were being
arrested all over the country, and sent on to New York for
identification. Three had been arrested at Liverpool, and one man just
as he landed at Sydney, Australia. But so far the murderer had
escaped.

We were all talking about it one night, as everybody else was all over
the country, in the local room, and the city editor said it was worth
a fortune to any one who chanced to run across Hade and succeeded in
handing him over to the police. Some of us thought Hade had taken
passage from some one of the smaller seaports, and others were of the
opinion that he had buried himself in some cheap lodging-house in New
York, or in one of the smaller towns in New Jersey.

"I shouldn't be surprised to meet him out walking, right here in
Philadelphia," said one of the staff. "He'll be disguised, of course,
but you could always tell him by the absence of the trigger finger on
his right hand. It's missing, you know; shot off when he was a boy."

"You want to look for a man dressed like a tough," said the city
editor; "for as this fellow is to all appearances a gentleman, he will
try to look as little like a gentleman as possible."

"No, he won't," said Gallegher, with that calm impertinence that made
him dear to us. "He'll dress just like a gentleman. Toughs don't wear
gloves, and you see he's got to wear 'em. The first thing he thought
of after doing for Burrbank was of that gone finger, and how he was to
hide it. He stuffed the finger of that glove with cotton so's to make
it look like a whole finger, and the first time he takes off that
glove they've got him--see, and he knows it. So what youse want to do
is to look for a man with gloves on. I've been a-doing it for two
weeks now, and I can tell you it's hard work, for everybody wears
gloves this kind of weather. But if you look long enough you'll find
him. And when you think it's him, go up to him and hold out your hand
in a friendly way, like a bunco-steerer, and shake his hand; and if
you feel that his forefinger ain't real flesh, but just wadded cotton,
then grip to it with your right and grab his throat with your left,
and holler for help."

There was an appreciative pause.

"I see, gentlemen," said the city editor, dryly, "that Gallegher's
reasoning has impressed you; and I also see that before the week is
out all of my young men will be under bonds for assaulting innocent
pedestrians whose only offence is that they wear gloves in midwinter."

It was about a week after this that Detective Hefflefinger, of
Inspector Byrnes's staff, came over to Philadelphia after a burglar,
of whose whereabouts he had been misinformed by telegraph. He brought
the warrant, requisition, and other necessary papers with him, but the
burglar had flown. One of our reporters had worked on a New York
paper, and knew Hefflefinger, and the detective came to the office to
see if he could help him in his so far unsuccessful search.

He gave Gallegher his card, and after Gallegher had read it, and had
discovered who the visitor was, he became so demoralized that he was
absolutely useless.

"One of Byrnes's men" was a much more awe-inspiring individual to
Gallegher than a member of the Cabinet. He accordingly seized his hat
and overcoat, and leaving his duties to be looked after by others,
hastened out after the object of his admiration, who found his
suggestions and knowledge of the city so valuable, and his company so
entertaining, that they became very intimate, and spent the rest of
the day together.

In the meanwhile the managing editor had instructed his subordinates
to inform Gallegher, when he condescended to return, that his services
were no longer needed. Gallegher had played truant once too often.
Unconscious of this, he remained with his new friend until late the
same evening, and started the next afternoon toward the _Press_
office.

As I have said, Gallegher lived in the most distant part of the city,
not many minutes' walk from the Kensington railroad station, where
trains ran into the suburbs and on to New York.

It was in front of this station that a smoothly shaven, well-dressed
man brushed past Gallegher and hurried up the steps to the ticket
office.

He held a walking-stick in his right hand, and Gallegher, who now
patiently scrutinized the hands of every one who wore gloves, saw that
while three fingers of the man's hand were closed around the cane, the
fourth stood out in almost a straight line with his palm.

Gallegher stopped with a gasp and with a trembling all over his little
body, and his brain asked with a throb if it could be possible. But
possibilities and probabilities were to be discovered later. Now was
the time for action.

He was after the man in a moment, hanging at his heels and his eyes
moist with excitement. He heard the man ask for a ticket to
Torresdale, a little station just outside of Philadelphia, and when he
was out of hearing, but not out of sight, purchased one for the same
place.

The stranger went into the smoking-car, and seated himself at one end
toward the door. Gallegher took his place at the opposite end.

He was trembling all over, and suffered from a slight feeling of
nausea. He guessed it came from fright, not of any bodily harm that
might come to him, but at the probability of failure in his adventure
and of its most momentous possibilities.

The stranger pulled his coat collar up around his ears, hiding the
lower portion of his face, but not concealing the resemblance in his
troubled eyes and close-shut lips to the likenesses of the murderer
Hade.

They reached Torresdale in half an hour, and the stranger, alighting
quickly, struck off at a rapid pace down the country road leading to
the station.

Gallegher gave him a hundred yards' start, and then followed slowly
after. The road ran between fields and past a few frame-houses set far
from the road in kitchen gardens.

Once or twice the man looked back over his shoulder, but he saw only a
dreary length of road with a small boy splashing through the slush in
the midst of it and stopping every now and again to throw snowballs at
belated sparrows.

After a ten minutes' walk the stranger turned into a side road which
led to only one place, the Eagle Inn, an old roadside hostelry known
now as the headquarters for pothunters from the Philadelphia game
market and the battle-ground of many a cock-fight.

Gallegher knew the place well. He and his young companions had often
stopped there when out chestnutting on holidays in the autumn.

The son of the man who kept it had often accompanied them on their
excursions, and though the boys of the city streets considered him a
dumb lout, they respected him somewhat owing to his inside knowledge
of dog and cock-fights.

The stranger entered the inn at a side door, and Gallegher, reaching
it a few minutes later, let him go for the time being, and set about
finding his occasional playmate, young Keppler.

Keppler's offspring was found in the wood-shed.

"'Tain't hard to guess what brings you out here," said the tavern-
keeper's son, with a grin; "it's the fight."

"What fight?" asked Gallegher, unguardedly.

"What fight? Why, _the_ fight," returned his companion, with the slow
contempt of superior knowledge. "It's to come off here to-night. You
knew that as well as me; anyway your sportin' editor knows it. He got
the tip last night, but that won't help you any. You needn't think
there's any chance of your getting a peep at it. Why, tickets is two
hundred and fifty apiece!"

"Whew!" whistled Gallegher, "where's it to be?"

"In the barn," whispered Keppler. "I helped 'em fix the ropes this
morning, I did."

"Gosh, but you're in luck," exclaimed Gallegher, with flattering envy.
"Couldn't I jest get a peep at it?"

"Maybe," said the gratified Keppler. "There's a winder with a wooden
shutter at the back of the barn. You can get in by it, if you have
some one to boost you up to the sill."

"Sa-a-y," drawled Gallegher, as if something had but just that moment
reminded him. "Who's that gent who come down the road just a bit ahead
of me--him with the cape-coat! Has he got anything to do with the
fight?"

"Him?" repeated Keppler in tones of sincere disgust. "No-oh, he ain't
no sport. He's queer, Dad thinks. He come here one day last week about
ten in the morning, said his doctor told him to go out 'en the country
for his health. He's stuck up and citified, and wears gloves, and
takes his meals private in his room, and all that sort of ruck. They
was saying in the saloon last night that they thought he was hiding
from something, and Dad, just to try him, asks him last night if he
was coming to see the fight. He looked sort of scared, and said he
didn't want to see no fight. And then Dad says, 'I guess you mean you
don't want no fighters to see you.' Dad didn't mean no harm by it,
just passed it as a joke; but Mr. Carleton, as he calls himself, got
white as a ghost an' says, 'I'll go to the fight willing enough,' and
begins to laugh and joke. And this morning he went right into the bar-
room, where all the sports were setting, and said he was going into
town to see some friends; and as he starts off he laughs an' says,
'This don't look as if I was afraid of seeing people, does it?' but
Dad says it was just bluff that made him do it, and Dad thinks that if
he hadn't said what he did, this Mr. Carleton wouldn't have left his
room at all."

Gallegher had got all he wanted, and much more than he had hoped for--
so much more that his walk back to the station was in the nature of a
triumphal march.

He had twenty minutes to wait for the next train, and it seemed an
hour. While waiting he sent a telegram to Hefflefinger at his hotel.
It read: "Your man is near the Torresdale station, on Pennsylvania
Railroad; take cab, and meet me at station. Wait until I come.
GALLEGHER."

With the exception of one at midnight, no other train stopped at
Torresdale that evening, hence the direction to take a cab.

The train to the city seemed to Gallegher to drag itself by inches. It
stopped and backed at purposeless intervals, waited for an express to
precede it, and dallied at stations, and when, at last, it reached the
terminus, Gallegher was out before it had stopped and was in the cab
and off on his way to the home of the sporting editor.

The sporting editor was at dinner and came out in the hall to see him,
with his napkin in his hand. Gallegher explained breathlessly that he
had located the murderer for whom the police of two continents were
looking, and that he believed, in order to quiet the suspicions of the
people with whom he was hiding, that he would be present at the fight
that night.

The sporting editor led Gallegher into his library and shut the door.
"Now," he said, "go over all that again."

Gallegher went over it again in detail, and added how he had sent for
Hefflefinger to make the arrest in order that it might be kept from
the knowledge of the local police and from the Philadelphia reporters.

"What I want Hefflefinger to do is to arrest Hade with the warrant he
has for the burglar," explained Gallegher; "and to take him on to New
York on the owl train that passes Torresdale at one. It don't get to
Jersey City until four o'clock, one hour after the morning papers go
to press. Of course, we must fix Hefflefinger so's he'll keep quiet
and not tell who his prisoner really is."

The sporting editor reached his hand out to pat Gallegher on the head,
but changed his mind and shook hands with him instead.

"My boy," he said, "you are an infant phenomenon. If I can pull the
rest of this thing off to-night it will mean the $5,000 reward and
fame galore for you and the paper. Now, I'm going to write a note to
the managing editor, and you can take it around to him and tell him
what you've done and what I am going to do, and he'll take you back on
the paper and raise your salary. Perhaps you didn't know you've been
discharged?"

"Do you think you ain't a-going to take me with you?" demanded
Gallegher.

"Why, certainly not. Why should I? It all lies with the detective and
myself now. You've done your share, and done it well. If the man's
caught, the reward's yours. But you'd only be in the way now. You'd
better go to the office and make your peace with the chief."

"If the paper can get along without me, I can get along without the
old paper," said Gallegher, hotly. "And if I ain't a-going with you,
you ain't neither, for I know where Hefflefinger is to be, and you
don't, and I won't tell you."

"Oh, very well, very well," replied the sporting editor, weakly
capitulating. "I'll send the note by a messenger; only mind, if you
lose your place, don't blame me."

Gallegher wondered how this man could value a week's salary against
the excitement of seeing a noted criminal run down, and of getting the
news to the paper, and to that one paper alone.

From that moment the sporting editor sank in Gallegher's estimation.

Mr. Dwyer sat down at his desk and scribbled off the following note:

"I have received reliable information that Hade, the Burrbank
murderer, will be present at the fight to-night. We have arranged it
so that he will be arrested quietly and in such a manner that the fact
may be kept from all other papers. I need not point out to you that
this will be the most important piece of news in the country to-
morrow.

"Yours, etc., MICHAEL E. DWYER."

The sporting editor stepped into the waiting cab, while Gallegher
whispered the directions to the driver. He was told to go first to a
district-messenger office, and from there up to the Ridge Avenue Road,
out Broad Street, and on to the old Eagle Inn, near Torresdale. It was
a miserable night. The rain and snow were falling together, and
freezing as they fell. The sporting editor got out to send his message
to the _Press_ office, and then lighting a cigar, and turning up the
collar of his great-coat, curled up in the corner of the cab.

"Wake me when we get there, Gallegher," he said. He knew he had a long
ride, and much rapid work before him, and he was preparing for the
strain.

To Gallegher the idea of going to sleep seemed almost criminal. From
the dark corner of the cab his eyes shone with excitement, and with
the awful joy of anticipation. He glanced every now and then to where
the sporting editor's cigar shone in the darkness, and watched it as
it gradually burnt more dimly and went out. The lights in the shop
windows threw a broad glare across the ice on the pavements, and the
lights from the lamp-posts tossed the distorted shadow of the cab, and
the horse, and the motionless driver, sometimes before and sometimes
behind them.

After half an hour Gallegher slipped down to the bottom of the cab and
dragged out a lap-robe, in which he wrapped himself. It was growing
colder, and the damp, keen wind swept in through the cracks until the
window-frames and woodwork were cold to the touch.

An hour passed, and the cab was still moving more slowly over the
rough surface of partly paved streets, and by single rows of new
houses standing at different angles to each other in fields covered
with ash-heaps and brick-kilns. Here and there the gaudy lights of a
drug-store, and the forerunner of suburban civilization, shone from
the end of a new block of houses, and the rubber cape of an occasional
policeman showed in the light of the lamp-post that he hugged for
comfort.

Then even the houses disappeared, and the cab dragged its way between
truck farms, with desolate-looking glass-covered beds, and pools of
water, half-caked with ice, and bare trees, and interminable fences.

Once or twice the cab stopped altogether, and Gallegher could hear the
driver swearing to himself, or at the horse, or the roads. At last
they drew up before the station at Torresdale. It was quite deserted,
and only a single light cut a swath in the darkness and showed a
portion of the platform, the ties, and the rails glistening in the
rain. They walked twice past the light before a figure stepped out of
the shadow and greeted them cautiously.

"I am Mr. Dwyer, of the _Press,_" said the sporting editor, briskly.
"You've heard of me, perhaps. Well, there shouldn't be any difficulty
in our making a deal, should there? This boy here has found Hade, and
we have reason to believe he will be among the spectators at the fight
to-night. We want you to arrest him quietly, and as secretly as
possible. You can do it with your papers and your badge easily enough.
We want you to pretend that you believe he is this burglar you came
over after. If you will do this, and take him away without any one so
much as suspecting who he really is, and on the train that passes here
at 1.20 for New York, we will give you $500 out of the $5,000 reward.
If, however, one other paper, either in New York or Philadelphia, or
anywhere else, knows of the arrest, you won't get a cent. Now, what do
you say?"

The detective had a great deal to say. He wasn't at all sure the man
Gallegher suspected was Hade; he feared he might get himself into
trouble by making a false arrest, and if it should be the man, he was
afraid the local police would interfere.

"We've no time to argue or debate this matter," said Dwyer, warmly.
"We agree to point Hade out to you in the crowd. After the fight is
over you arrest him as we have directed, and you get the money and the
credit of the arrest. If you don't like this, I will arrest the man
myself, and have him driven to town, with a pistol for a warrant."

Hefflefinger considered in silence and then agreed unconditionally.
"As you say, Mr. Dwyer," he returned. "I've heard of you for a
thoroughbred sport. I know you'll do what you say you'll do; and as
for me I'll do what you say and just as you say, and it's a very
pretty piece of work as it stands."

They all stepped back into the cab, and then it was that they were met
by a fresh difficulty, how to get the detective into the barn where
the fight was to take place, for neither of the two men had $250 to
pay for his admittance.

But this was overcome when Gallegher remembered the window of which
young Keppler had told him.

In the event of Hade's losing courage and not daring to show himself
in the crowd around the ring, it was agreed that Dwyer should come to
the barn and warn Hefflefinger; but if he should come, Dwyer was
merely to keep near him and to signify by a prearranged gesture which
one of the crowd he was.

They drew up before a great black shadow of a house, dark, forbidding,
and apparently deserted. But at the sound of the wheels on the gravel
the door opened, letting out a stream of warm, cheerful light, and a
man's voice said, "Put out those lights. Don't youse know no better
than that?" This was Keppler, and he welcomed Mr. Dwyer with effusive
courtesy.

The two men showed in the stream of light, and the door closed on
them, leaving the house as it was at first, black and silent, save for
the dripping of the rain and snow from the eaves.

The detective and Gallegher put out the cab's lamps and led the horse
toward a long, low shed in the rear of the yard, which they now
noticed was almost filled with teams of many different makes, from the
Hobson's choice of a livery stable to the brougham of the man about
town.

"No," said Gallegher, as the cabman stopped to hitch the horse beside
the others, "we want it nearest that lower gate. When we newspaper men
leave this place we'll leave it in a hurry, and the man who is nearest
town is likely to get there first. You won't be a-following of no
hearse when you make your return trip."

Gallegher tied the horse to the very gate-post itself, leaving the
gate open and allowing a clear road and a flying start for the
prospective race to Newspaper Row.

The driver disappeared under the shelter of the porch, and Gallegher
and the detective moved off cautiously to the rear of the barn. "This
must be the window," said Hefflefinger, pointing to a broad wooden
shutter some feet from the ground.

"Just you give me a boost once, and I'll get that open in a jiffy,"
said Gallegher.

The detective placed his hands on his knees, and Gallegher stood upon
his shoulders, and with the blade of his knife lifted the wooden
button that fastened the window on the inside, and pulled the shutter
open.

Then he put one leg inside over the sill, and leaning down helped to
draw his fellow-conspirator up to a level with the window. "I feel
just like I was burglarizing a house," chuckled Gallegher, as he
dropped noiselessly to the floor below and refastened the shutter. The
barn was a large one, with a row of stalls on either side in which
horses and cows were dozing. There was a haymow over each row of
stalls, and at one end of the barn a number of fence-rails had been
thrown across from one mow to the other. These rails were covered with
hay.

[Illustration with caption: Gallegher stood upon his shoulders.]

In the middle of the floor was the ring. It was not really a ring, but
a square, with wooden posts at its four corners through which ran a
heavy rope. The space inclosed by the rope was covered with sawdust.

Gallegher could not resist stepping into the ring, and after stamping
the sawdust once or twice, as if to assure himself that he was really
there, began dancing around it, and indulging in such a remarkable
series of fistic manoeuvres with an imaginary adversary that the
unimaginative detective precipitately backed into a corner of the
barn.

"Now, then," said Gallegher, having apparently vanquished his foe,
"you come with me." His companion followed quickly as Gallegher
climbed to one of the hay-mows, and crawling carefully out on the
fence-rail, stretched himself at full length, face downward. In this
position, by moving the straw a little, he could look down, without
being himself seen, upon the heads of whomsoever stood below. "This is
better'n a private box, ain't it?" said Gallegher.

The boy from the newspaper office and the detective lay there in
silence, biting at straws and tossing anxiously on their comfortable
bed.

It seemed fully two hours before they came. Gallegher had listened
without breathing, and with every muscle on a strain, at least a dozen
times, when some movement in the yard had led him to believe that they
were at the door. And he had numerous doubts and fears. Sometimes it
was that the police had learnt of the fight, and had raided Keppler's
in his absence, and again it was that the fight had been postponed,
or, worst of all, that it would be put off until so late that Mr.
Dwyer could not get back in time for the last edition of the paper.
Their coming, when at last they came, was heralded by an advance-guard
of two sporting men, who stationed themselves at either side of the
big door.

"Hurry up, now, gents," one of the men said with a shiver, "don't keep
this door open no longer'n is needful."

It was not a very large crowd, but it was wonderfully well selected.
It ran, in the majority of its component parts, to heavy white coats
with pearl buttons. The white coats were shouldered by long blue coats
with astrakhan fur trimmings, the wearers of which preserved a
cliqueness not remarkable when one considers that they believed every
one else present to be either a crook or a prize-fighter.

There were well-fed, well-groomed club-men and brokers in the crowd, a
politician or two, a popular comedian with his manager, amateur boxers
from the athletic clubs, and quiet, close-mouthed sporting men from
every city in the country. Their names if printed in the papers would
have been as familiar as the types of the papers themselves.

And among these men, whose only thought was of the brutal sport to
come, was Hade, with Dwyer standing at ease at his shoulder,--Hade,
white, and visibly in deep anxiety, hiding his pale face beneath a
cloth travelling-cap, and with his chin muffled in a woollen scarf. He
had dared to come because he feared his danger from the already
suspicious Keppler was less than if he stayed away. And so he was
there, hovering restlessly on the border of the crowd, feeling his
danger and sick with fear.

When Hefflefinger first saw him he started up on his hands and elbows
and made a movement forward as if he would leap down then and there
and carry off his prisoner single-handed.

"Lie down," growled Gallegher; "an officer of any sort wouldn't live
three minutes in that crowd."

The detective drew back slowly and buried himself again in the straw,
but never once through the long fight which followed did his eyes
leave the person of the murderer. The newspaper men took their places
in the foremost row close around the ring, and kept looking at their
watches and begging the master of ceremonies to "shake it up, do."

There was a great deal of betting, and all of the men handled the
great roll of bills they wagered with a flippant recklessness which
could only be accounted for in Gallegher's mind by temporary mental
derangement. Some one pulled a box out into the ring and the master of
ceremonies mounted it, and pointed out in forcible language that as
they were almost all already under bonds to keep the peace, it
behooved all to curb their excitement and to maintain a severe
silence, unless they wanted to bring the police upon them and have
themselves "sent down" for a year or two.

Then two very disreputable-looking persons tossed their respective
principals' high hats into the ring, and the crowd, recognizing in
this relic of the days when brave knights threw down their gauntlets
in the lists as only a sign that the fight was about to begin, cheered
tumultuously.

This was followed by a sudden surging forward, and a mutter of
admiration much more flattering than the cheers had been, when the
principals followed their hats, and slipping out of their great-coats,
stood forth in all the physical beauty of the perfect brute.

Their pink skin was as soft and healthy looking as a baby's, and
glowed in the lights of the lanterns like tinted ivory, and underneath
this silken covering the great biceps and muscles moved in and out and
looked like the coils of a snake around the branch of a tree.

Gentleman and blackguard shouldered each other for a nearer view; the
coachmen, whose metal buttons were unpleasantly suggestive of police,
put their hands, in the excitement of the moment, on the shoulders of
their masters; the perspiration stood out in great drops on the
foreheads of the backers, and the newspaper men bit somewhat nervously
at the ends of their pencils.

And in the stalls the cows munched contentedly at their cuds and gazed
with gentle curiosity at their two fellow-brutes, who stood waiting
the signal to fall upon, and kill each other if need be, for the
delectation of their brothers.

"Take your places," commanded the master of ceremonies.

In the moment in which the two men faced each other the crowd became
so still that, save for the beating of the rain upon the shingled roof
and the stamping of a horse in one of the stalls, the place was as
silent as a church.

"Time," shouted the master of ceremonies.

The two men sprang into a posture of defence, which was lost as
quickly as it was taken, one great arm shot out like a piston-rod;
there was the sound of bare fists beating on naked flesh; there was an
exultant indrawn gasp of savage pleasure and relief from the crowd,
and the great fight had begun.

How the fortunes of war rose and fell, and changed and rechanged that
night, is an old story to those who listen to such stories; and those
who do not will be glad to be spared the telling of it. It was, they
say, one of the bitterest fights between two men that this country has
ever known.

But all that is of interest here is that after an hour of this
desperate brutal business the champion ceased to be the favorite; the
man whom he had taunted and bullied, and for whom the public had but
little sympathy, was proving himself a likely winner, and under his
cruel blows, as sharp and clean as those from a cutlass, his opponent
was rapidly giving way.

The men about the ropes were past all control now; they drowned
Keppler's petitions for silence with oaths and in inarticulate shouts
of anger, as if the blows had fallen upon them, and in mad rejoicings.
They swept from one end of the ring to the other, with every muscle
leaping in unison with those of the man they favored, and when a New
York correspondent muttered over his shoulder that this would be the
biggest sporting surprise since the Heenan-Sayers fight, Mr. Dwyer
nodded his head sympathetically in assent.

In the excitement and tumult it is doubtful if any heard the three
quickly repeated blows that fell heavily from the outside upon the big
doors of the barn. If they did, it was already too late to mend
matters, for the door fell, torn from its hinges, and as it fell a
captain of police sprang into the light from out of the storm, with
his lieutenants and their men crowding close at his shoulder.

In the panic and stampede that followed, several of the men stood as
helplessly immovable as though they had seen a ghost; others made a
mad rush into the arms of the officers and were beaten back against
the ropes of the ring; others dived headlong into the stalls, among
the horses and cattle, and still others shoved the rolls of money they
held into the hands of the police and begged like children to be
allowed to escape.

The instant the door fell and the raid was declared Hefflefinger
slipped over the cross rails on which he had been lying, hung for an
instant by his hands, and then dropped into the centre of the fighting
mob on the floor. He was out of it in an instant with the agility of a
pickpocket, was across the room and at Hade's throat like a dog. The
murderer, for the moment, was the calmer man of the two.

"Here," he panted, "hands off, now. There's no need for all this
violence. There's no great harm in looking at a fight, is there?
There's a hundred-dollar bill in my right hand; take it and let me
slip out of this. No one is looking. Here."

But the detective only held him the closer.

"I want you for burglary," he whispered under his breath. "You've got
to come with me now, and quick. The less fuss you make, the better for
both of us. If you don't know who I am, you can feel my badge under my
coat there. I've got the authority. It's all regular, and when we're
out of this d--d row I'll show you the papers."

He took one hand from Hade's throat and pulled a pair of handcuffs
from his pocket.

"It's a mistake. This is an outrage," gasped the murderer, white and
trembling, but dreadfully alive and desperate for his liberty. "Let me
go, I tell you! Take your hands off of me! Do I look like a burglar,
you fool?"

"I know who you look like," whispered the detective, with his face
close to the face of his prisoner. "Now, will you go easy as a
burglar, or shall I tell these men who you are and what I _do_ want
you for? Shall I call out your real name or not? Shall I tell them?
Quick, speak up; shall I?"

There was something so exultant--something so unnecessarily savage in
the officer's face that the man he held saw that the detective knew
him for what he really was, and the hands that had held his throat
slipped down around his shoulders, or he would have fallen. The man's
eyes opened and closed again, and he swayed weakly backward and
forward, and choked as if his throat were dry and burning. Even to
such a hardened connoisseur in crime as Gallegher, who stood closely
by, drinking it in, there was something so abject in the man's terror
that he regarded him with what was almost a touch of pity.

"For God's sake," Hade begged, "let me go. Come with me to my room and
I'll give you half the money. I'll divide with you fairly. We can both
get away. There's a fortune for both of us there. We both can get
away. You'll be rich for life. Do you understand--for life!"

But the detective, to his credit, only shut his lips the tighter.

"That's enough," he whispered, in return. "That's more than I
expected. You've sentenced yourself already. Come!"

Two officers in uniform barred their exit at the door, but
Hefflefinger smiled easily and showed his badge.

"One of Byrnes's men," he said, in explanation; "came over expressly
to take this chap. He's a burglar; 'Arlie' Lane, _alias_ Carleton.
I've shown the papers to the captain. It's all regular. I'm just going
to get his traps at the hotel and walk him over to the station. I
guess we'll push right on to New York to-night."

The officers nodded and smiled their admiration for the representative
of what is, perhaps, the best detective force in the world, and let
him pass.

Then Hefflefinger turned and spoke to Gallegher, who still stood as
watchful as a dog at his side. "I'm going to his room to get the bonds
and stuff," he whispered; "then I'll march him to the station and take
that train. I've done my share; don't forget yours!"

"Oh, you'll get your money right enough," said Gallegher. "And, sa-ay,"
he added, with the appreciative nod of an expert, "do you know, you did
it rather well."

Mr. Dwyer had been writing while the raid was settling down, as he had
been writing while waiting for the fight to begin. Now he walked over
to where the other correspondents stood in angry conclave.

The newspaper men had informed the officers who hemmed them in that
they represented the principal papers of the country, and were
expostulating vigorously with the captain, who had planned the raid,
and who declared they were under arrest.

[Illustration with caption: "For God's sake," Hade begged, "let me
go!"]

"Don't be an ass, Scott," said Mr. Dwyer, who was too excited to be
polite or politic. "You know our being here isn't a matter of choice.
We came here on business, as you did, and you've no right to hold us."

"If we don't get our stuff on the wire at once," protested a New York
man, "we'll be too late for to-morrow's paper, and----"

Captain Scott said he did not care a profanely small amount for to-
morrow's paper, and that all he knew was that to the station-house the
newspaper men would go. There they would have a hearing, and if the
magistrate chose to let them off, that was the magistrate's business,
but that his duty was to take them into custody.

"But then it will be too late, don't you understand?" shouted Mr.
Dwyer. "You've got to let us go _now,_ at once."

"I can't do it, Mr. Dwyer," said the captain, "and that's all there is
to it. Why, haven't I just sent the president of the Junior Republican
Club to the patrol-wagon, the man that put this coat on me, and do you
think I can let you fellows go after that? You were all put under
bonds to keep the peace not three days ago, and here you're at it--
fighting like badgers. It's worth my place to let one of you off."

What Mr. Dwyer said next was so uncomplimentary to the gallant Captain
Scott that that overwrought individual seized the sporting editor by
the shoulder, and shoved him into the hands of two of his men.

This was more than the distinguished Mr. Dwyer could brook, and he
excitedly raised his hand in resistance. But before he had time to do
anything foolish his wrist was gripped by one strong, little hand, and
he was conscious that another was picking the pocket of his great-
coat.

He slapped his hands to his sides, and looking down, saw Gallegher
standing close behind him and holding him by the wrist. Mr. Dwyer had
forgotten the boy's existence, and would have spoken sharply if
something in Gallegher's innocent eyes had not stopped him.

Gallegher's hand was still in that pocket, in which Mr. Dwyer had
shoved his note-book filled with what he had written of Gallegher's
work and Hade's final capture, and with a running descriptive account
of the fight. With his eyes fixed on Mr. Dwyer, Gallegher drew it out,
and with a quick movement shoved it inside his waistcoat. Mr. Dwyer
gave a nod of comprehension. Then glancing at his two guardsmen, and
finding that they were still interested in the wordy battle of the
correspondents with their chief, and had seen nothing, he stooped and
whispered to Gallegher: "The forms are locked at twenty minutes to
three. If you don't get there by that time it will be of no use, but
if you're on time you'll beat the town--and the country too."

Gallegher's eyes flashed significantly, and nodding his head to show
he understood, started boldly on a run toward the door. But the
officers who guarded it brought him to an abrupt halt, and, much to
Mr. Dwyer's astonishment, drew from him what was apparently a torrent
of tears.

"Let me go to me father. I want me father," the boy shrieked,
hysterically. "They've 'rested father. Oh, daddy, daddy. They're a-
goin' to take you to prison."

"Who is your father, sonny?" asked one of the guardians of the gate.

"Keppler's me father," sobbed Gallegher. "They're a-goin' to lock him
up, and I'll never see him no more."

"Oh, yes, you will," said the officer, good-naturedly; "he's there in
that first patrol-wagon. You can run over and say good night to him,
and then you'd better get to bed. This ain't no place for kids of your
age."

"Thank you, sir," sniffed Gallegher, tearfully, as the two officers
raised their clubs, and let him pass out into the darkness.

The yard outside was in a tumult, horses were stamping, and plunging,
and backing the carriages into one another; lights were flashing from
every window of what had been apparently an uninhabited house, and the
voices of the prisoners were still raised in angry expostulation.

Three police patrol-wagons were moving about the yard, filled with
unwilling passengers, who sat or stood, packed together like sheep,
and with no protection from the sleet and rain.

Gallegher stole off into a dark corner, and watched the scene until
his eyesight became familiar with the position of the land.

Then with his eyes fixed fearfully on the swinging light of a lantern
with which an officer was searching among the carriages, he groped his
way between horses' hoofs and behind the wheels of carriages to the
cab which he had himself placed at the furthermost gate. It was still
there, and the horse, as he had left it, with its head turned toward
the city. Gallegher opened the big gate noiselessly, and worked
nervously at the hitching strap. The knot was covered with a thin
coating of ice, and it was several minutes before he could loosen it.
But his teeth finally pulled it apart, and with the reins in his hands
he sprang upon the wheel. And as he stood so, a shock of fear ran down
his back like an electric current, his breath left him, and he stood
immovable, gazing with wide eyes into the darkness.

The officer with the lantern had suddenly loomed up from behind a
carriage not fifty feet distant, and was standing perfectly still,
with his lantern held over his head, peering so directly toward
Gallegher that the boy felt that he must see him. Gallegher stood with
one foot on the hub of the wheel and with the other on the box waiting
to spring. It seemed a minute before either of them moved, and then
the officer took a step forward, and demanded sternly, "Who is that?
What are you doing there?"

There was no time for parley then. Gallegher felt that he had been
taken in the act, and that his only chance lay in open flight. He
leaped up on the box, pulling out the whip as he did so, and with a
quick sweep lashed the horse across the head and back. The animal
sprang forward with a snort, narrowly clearing the gate-post, and
plunged off into the darkness.

"Stop!" cried the officer.

So many of Gallegher's acquaintances among the 'longshoremen and mill
hands had been challenged in so much the same manner that Gallegher
knew what would probably follow if the challenge was disregarded. So
he slipped from his seat to the footboard below, and ducked his head.

The three reports of a pistol, which rang out briskly from behind him,
proved that his early training had given him a valuable fund of useful
miscellaneous knowledge.

"Don't you be scared," he said, reassuringly, to the horse; "he's
firing in the air."

The pistol-shots were answered by the impatient clangor of a patrol-
wagon's gong, and glancing over his shoulder Gallegher saw its red and
green lanterns tossing from side to side and looking in the darkness
like the side-lights of a yacht plunging forward in a storm.

"I hadn't bargained to race you against no patrol-wagons," said
Gallegher to his animal; "but if they want a race, we'll give them a
tough tussle for it, won't we?"

Philadelphia, lying four miles to the south, sent up a faint yellow
glow to the sky. It seemed very far away, and Gallegher's braggadocio
grew cold within him at the loneliness of his adventure and the
thought of the long ride before him.

It was still bitterly cold.

The rain and sleet beat through his clothes, and struck his skin with
a sharp chilling touch that set him trembling.

Even the thought of the over-weighted patrol-wagon probably sticking
in the mud some safe distance in the rear, failed to cheer him, and
the excitement that had so far made him callous to the cold died out
and left him weaker and nervous. But his horse was chilled with the
long standing, and now leaped eagerly forward, only too willing to
warm the half-frozen blood in its veins.

"You're a good beast," said Gallegher, plaintively. "You've got more
nerve than me. Don't you go back on me now. Mr. Dwyer says we've got
to beat the town." Gallegher had no idea what time it was as he rode
through the night, but he knew he would be able to find out from a big
clock over a manufactory at a point nearly three-quarters of the
distance from Keppler's to the goal.

He was still in the open country and driving recklessly, for he knew
the best part of his ride must be made outside the city limits.

He raced between desolate-looking corn-fields with bare stalks and
patches of muddy earth rising above the thin covering of snow, truck
farms and brick-yards fell behind him on either side. It was very
lonely work, and once or twice the dogs ran yelping to the gates and
barked after him.

Part of his way lay parallel with the railroad tracks, and he drove
for some time beside long lines of freight and coal cars as they stood
resting for the night. The fantastic Queen Anne suburban stations were
dark and deserted, but in one or two of the block-towers he could see
the operators writing at their desks, and the sight in some way
comforted him.

Once he thought of stopping to get out the blanket in which he had
wrapped himself on the first trip, but he feared to spare the time,
and drove on with his teeth chattering and his shoulders shaking with
the cold.

He welcomed the first solitary row of darkened houses with a faint
cheer of recognition. The scattered lamp-posts lightened his spirits,
and even the badly paved streets rang under the beats of his horse's
feet like music. Great mills and manufactories, with only a night-
watchman's light in the lowest of their many stories, began to take
the place of the gloomy farm-houses and gaunt trees that had startled
him with their grotesque shapes. He had been driving nearly an hour,
he calculated, and in that time the rain had changed to a wet snow,
that fell heavily and clung to whatever it touched. He passed block
after block of trim workmen's houses, as still and silent as the
sleepers within them, and at last he turned the horse's head into
Broad Street, the city's great thoroughfare, that stretches from its
one end to the other and cuts it evenly in two.

He was driving noiselessly over the snow and slush in the street, with
his thoughts bent only on the clock-face he wished so much to see,
when a hoarse voice challenged him from the sidewalk. "Hey, you, stop
there, hold up!" said the voice.

Gallegher turned his head, and though he saw that the voice came from
under a policeman's helmet, his only answer was to hit his horse
sharply over the head with his whip and to urge it into a gallop.

This, on his part, was followed by a sharp, shrill whistle from the
policeman. Another whistle answered it from a street-corner one block
ahead of him. "Whoa," said Gallegher, pulling on the reins. "There's
one too many of them," he added, in apologetic explanation. The horse
stopped, and stood, breathing heavily, with great clouds of steam
rising from its flanks.

"Why in hell didn't you stop when I told you to?" demanded the voice,
now close at the cab's side.

"I didn't hear you," returned Gallegher, sweetly. "But I heard you
whistle, and I heard your partner whistle, and I thought maybe it was
me you wanted to speak to, so I just stopped."

"You heard me well enough. Why aren't your lights lit?" demanded the
voice.

"Should I have 'em lit?" asked Gallegher, bending over and regarding
them with sudden interest.

"You know you should, and if you don't, you've no right to be driving
that cab. I don't believe you're the regular driver, anyway. Where'd
you get it?"

"It ain't my cab, of course," said Gallegher, with an easy laugh.
"It's Luke McGovern's. He left it outside Cronin's while he went in to
get a drink, and he took too much, and me father told me to drive it
round to the stable for him. I'm Cronin's son. McGovern ain't in no
condition to drive. You can see yourself how he's been misusing the
horse. He puts it up at Bachman's livery stable, and I was just going
around there now."

Gallegher's knowledge of the local celebrities of the district
confused the zealous officer of the peace. He surveyed the boy with a
steady stare that would have distressed a less skilful liar, but
Gallegher only shrugged his shoulders slightly, as if from the cold,
and waited with apparent indifference to what the officer would say
next.

In reality his heart was beating heavily against his side, and he felt
that if he was kept on a strain much longer he would give way and
break down. A second snow-covered form emerged suddenly from the
shadow of the houses.

"What is it, Reeder?" it asked.

"Oh, nothing much," replied the first officer.

"This kid hadn't any lamps lit, so I called to him to stop and he
didn't do it, so I whistled to you. It's all right, though. He's just
taking it round to Bachman's. Go ahead," he added, sulkily.

"Get up!" chirped Gallegher. "Good night," he added, over his
shoulder.

Gallegher gave an hysterical little gasp of relief as he trotted away
from the two policemen, and poured bitter maledictions on their heads
for two meddling fools as he went.

"They might as well kill a man as scare him to death," he said, with
an attempt to get back to his customary flippancy. But the effort was
somewhat pitiful, and he felt guiltily conscious that a salt, warm
tear was creeping slowly down his face, and that a lump that would not
keep down was rising in his throat.

"'Tain't no fair thing for the whole police force to keep worrying at
a little boy like me," he said, in shame-faced apology. "I'm not doing
nothing wrong, and I'm half froze to death, and yet they keep a-
nagging at me."

It was so cold that when the boy stamped his feet against the
footboard to keep them warm, sharp pains shot up through his body, and
when he beat his arms about his shoulders, as he had seen real cabmen
do, the blood in his finger-tips tingled so acutely that he cried
aloud with the pain.

He had often been up that late before, but he had never felt so
sleepy. It was as if some one was pressing a sponge heavy with
chloroform near his face, and he could not fight off the drowsiness
that lay hold of him.

He saw, dimly hanging above his head, a round disc of light that
seemed like a great moon, and which he finally guessed to be the
clock-face for which he had been on the look-out. He had passed it
before he realized this; but the fact stirred him into wakefulness
again, and when his cab's wheels slipped around the City Hall corner,
he remembered to look up at the other big clock-face that keeps awake
over the railroad station and measures out the night.

He gave a gasp of consternation when he saw that it was half-past two,
and that there was but ten minutes left to him. This, and the many
electric lights and the sight of the familiar pile of buildings,
startled him into a semi-consciousness of where he was and how great
was the necessity for haste.

He rose in his seat and called on the horse, and urged it into a
reckless gallop over the slippery asphalt. He considered nothing else
but speed, and looking neither to the left nor right dashed off down
Broad Street into Chestnut, where his course lay straight away to the
office, now only seven blocks distant.

Gallegher never knew how it began, but he was suddenly assaulted by
shouts on either side, his horse was thrown back on its haunches, and
he found two men in cabmen's livery hanging at its head, and patting
its sides, and calling it by name. And the other cabmen who have their
stand at the corner were swarming about the carriage, all of them
talking and swearing at once, and gesticulating wildly with their
whips.

They said they knew the cab was McGovern's, and they wanted to know
where he was, and why he wasn't on it; they wanted to know where
Gallegher had stolen it, and why he had been such a fool as to drive
it into the arms of its owner's friends; they said that it was about
time that a cab-driver could get off his box to take a drink without
having his cab run away with, and some of them called loudly for a
policeman to take the young thief in charge.

Gallegher felt as if he had been suddenly dragged into consciousness
out of a bad dream, and stood for a second like a half-awakened
somnambulist.

They had stopped the cab under an electric light, and its glare shone
coldly down upon the trampled snow and the faces of the men around
him.

Gallegher bent forward, and lashed savagely at the horse with his
whip.

"Let me go," he shouted, as he tugged impotently at the reins. "Let me
go, I tell you. I haven't stole no cab, and you've got no right to
stop me. I only want to take it to the _Press_ office," he begged.
"They'll send it back to you all right. They'll pay you for the trip.
I'm not running away with it. The driver's got the collar--he's
'rested--and I'm only a-going to the _Press_ office. Do you hear me?"
he cried, his voice rising and breaking in a shriek of passion and
disappointment. "I tell you to let go those reins. Let me go, or I'll
kill you. Do you hear me? I'll kill you." And leaning forward, the boy
struck savagely with his long whip at the faces of the men about the
horse's head.

Some one in the crowd reached up and caught him by the ankles, and
with a quick jerk pulled him off the box, and threw him on to the
street. But he was up on his knees in a moment, and caught at the
man's hand.

"Don't let them stop me, mister," he cried, "please let me go. I
didn't steal the cab, sir. S'help me, I didn't. I'm telling you the
truth. Take me to the _Press_ office, and they'll prove it to you.
They'll pay you anything you ask 'em. It's only such a little ways
now, and I've come so far, sir. Please don't let them stop me," he
sobbed, clasping the man about the knees. "For Heaven's sake, mister,
let me go!"

The managing editor of the _Press_ took up the india-rubber speaking-
tube at his side, and answered, "Not yet" to an inquiry the night
editor had already put to him five times within the last twenty
minutes.

Then he snapped the metal top of the tube impatiently, and went up-
stairs. As he passed the door of the local room, he noticed that the
reporters had not gone home, but were sitting about on the tables and
chairs, waiting. They looked up inquiringly as he passed, and the city
editor asked, "Any news yet?" and the managing editor shook his head.

The compositors were standing idle in the composing-room, and their
foreman was talking with the night editor.

"Well," said that gentleman, tentatively.

"Well," returned the managing editor, "I don't think we can wait; do
you?"

"It's a half-hour after time now," said the night editor, "and we'll
miss the suburban trains if we hold the paper back any longer. We
can't afford to wait for a purely hypothetical story. The chances are
all against the fight's having taken place or this Hade's having been
arrested."

"But if we're beaten on it--" suggested the chief. "But I don't think
that is possible. If there were any story to print, Dwyer would have
had it here before now."

The managing editor looked steadily down at the floor.

"Very well," he said, slowly, "we won't wait any longer. Go ahead," he
added, turning to the foreman with a sigh of reluctance. The foreman
whirled himself about, and began to give his orders; but the two
editors still looked at each other doubtfully.

As they stood so, there came a sudden shout and the sound of people
running to and fro in the reportorial rooms below. There was the tramp
of many footsteps on the stairs, and above the confusion they heard
the voice of the city editor telling some one to "run to Madden's and
get some brandy, quick."

No one in the composing-room said anything; but those compositors who
had started to go home began slipping off their overcoats, and every
one stood with his eyes fixed on the door.

It was kicked open from the outside, and in the doorway stood a cab-
driver and the city editor, supporting between them a pitiful little
figure of a boy, wet and miserable, and with the snow melting on his
clothes and running in little pools to the floor. "Why, it's
Gallegher," said the night editor, in a tone of the keenest
disappointment.

Gallegher shook himself free from his supporters, and took an unsteady
step forward, his fingers fumbling stiffly with the buttons of his
waistcoat.

"Mr. Dwyer, sir," he began faintly, with his eyes fixed fearfully on
the managing editor, "he got arrested--and I couldn't get here no
sooner, 'cause they kept a-stopping me, and they took me cab from
under me--but--" he pulled the notebook from his breast and held it
out with its covers damp and limp from the rain, "but we got Hade, and
here's Mr. Dwyer's copy."

And then he asked, with a queer note in his voice, partly of dread and
partly of hope, "Am I in time, sir?"

The managing editor took the book, and tossed it to the foreman, who
ripped out its leaves and dealt them out to his men as rapidly as a
gambler deals out cards.

Then the managing editor stooped and picked Gallegher up in his arms,
and, sitting down, began to unlace his wet and muddy shoes.

Gallegher made a faint effort to resist this degradation of the
managerial dignity; but his protest was a very feeble one, and his
head fell back heavily on the managing editor's shoulder.

To Gallegher the incandescent lights began to whirl about in circles,
and to burn in different colors; the faces of the reporters kneeling
before him and chafing his hands and feet grew dim and unfamiliar, and
the roar and rumble of the great presses in the basement sounded far
away, like the murmur of the sea.

And then the place and the circumstances of it came back to him again
sharply and with sudden vividness.

Gallegher looked up, with a faint smile, into the managing editor's
face. "You won't turn me off for running away, will you?" he
whispered.

The managing editor did not answer immediately. His head was bent, and
he was thinking, for some reason or other, of a little boy of his own,
at home in bed. Then he said, quietly, "Not this time, Gallegher."

Gallegher's head sank back comfortably on the older man's shoulder,
and he smiled comprehensively at the faces of the young men crowded
around him. "You hadn't ought to," he said, with a touch of his old
impudence, "'cause--I beat the town."




A WALK UP THE AVENUE


He came down the steps slowly, and pulling mechanically at his gloves.

He remembered afterwards that some woman's face had nodded brightly to
him from a passing brougham, and that he had lifted his hat through
force of habit, and without knowing who she was.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps, and stood for a moment
uncertainly, and then turned toward the north, not because he had any
definite goal in his mind, but because the other way led toward his
rooms, and he did not want to go there yet.

He was conscious of a strange feeling of elation, which he attributed
to his being free, and to the fact that he was his own master again in
everything. And with this he confessed to a distinct feeling of
littleness, of having acted meanly or unworthily of himself or of her.

And yet he had behaved well, even quixotically. He had tried to leave
the impression with her that it was her wish, and that she had broken
with him, not he with her.

He held a man who threw a girl over as something contemptible, and he
certainly did not want to appear to himself in that light; or, for her
sake, that people should think he had tired of her, or found her
wanting in any one particular. He knew only too well how people would
talk. How they would say he had never really cared for her; that he
didn't know his own mind when he had proposed to her; and that it was
a great deal better for her as it is than if he had grown out of humor
with her later. As to their saying she had jilted him, he didn't mind
that. He much preferred they should take that view of it, and he was
chivalrous enough to hope she would think so too.

He was walking slowly, and had reached Thirtieth Street. A great many
young girls and women had bowed to him or nodded from the passing
carriages, but it did not tend to disturb the measure of his thoughts.
He was used to having people put themselves out to speak to him;
everybody made a point of knowing him, not because he was so very
handsome and well-looking, and an over-popular youth, but because he
was as yet unspoiled by it.

But, in any event, he concluded, it was a miserable business. Still,
he had only done what was right. He had seen it coming on for a month
now, and how much better it was that they should separate now than
later, or that they should have had to live separated in all but
location for the rest of their lives! Yes, he had done the right
thing--decidedly the only thing to do.

He was still walking up the Avenue, and had reached Thirty-second
Street, at which point his thoughts received a sudden turn. A half-
dozen men in a club window nodded to him, and brought to him sharply
what he was going back to. He had dropped out of their lives as
entirely of late as though he had been living in a distant city. When
he had met them he had found their company uninteresting and
unprofitable. He had wondered how he had ever cared for that sort of
thing, and where had been the pleasure of it. Was he going back now to
the gossip of that window, to the heavy discussions of traps and
horses, to late breakfasts and early suppers? Must he listen to their
congratulations on his being one of them again, and must he guess at
their whispered conjectures as to how soon it would be before he again
took up the chains and harness of their fashion? He struck the
pavement sharply with his stick. No, he was not going back.

She had taught him to find amusement and occupation in many things
that were better and higher than any pleasures or pursuits he had
known before, and he could not give them up. He had her to thank for
that at least. And he would give her credit for it too, and
gratefully. He would always remember it, and he would show in his way
of living the influence and the good effects of these three months in
which they had been continually together.

He had reached Forty-second Street now. Well, it was over with, and he
would get to work at something or other. This experience had shown him
that he was not meant for marriage; that he was intended to live
alone. Because, if he found that a girl as lovely as she undeniably
was palled on him after three months, it was evident that he would
never live through life with any other one. Yes, he would always be a
bachelor. He had lived his life, had told his story at the age of
twenty-five, and would wait patiently for the end, a marked and gloomy
man. He would travel now and see the world. He would go to that hotel
in Cairo she was always talking about, where they were to have gone on
their honeymoon; or he might strike further into Africa, and come back
bronzed and worn with long marches and jungle fever, and with his hair
prematurely white. He even considered himself, with great self-pity,
returning and finding her married and happy, of course. And he
enjoyed, in anticipation, the secret doubts she would have of her
later choice when she heard on all sides praise of this distinguished
traveller.

And he pictured himself meeting her reproachful glances with fatherly
friendliness, and presenting her husband with tiger-skins, and buying
her children extravagant presents.

This was at Forty-fifth Street.

Yes, that was decidedly the best thing to do. To go away and improve
himself, and study up all those painters and cathedrals with which she
was so hopelessly conversant.

He remembered how out of it she had once made him feel, and how
secretly he had admired her when she had referred to a modern painting
as looking like those in the long gallery of the Louvre. He thought he
knew all about the Louvre, but he would go over again and locate that
long gallery, and become able to talk to her understandingly about it.

And then it came over him like a blast of icy air that he could never
talk over things with her again. He had reached Fifty-fifth Street
now, and the shock brought him to a standstill on the corner, where he
stood gazing blankly before him. He felt rather weak physically, and
decided to go back to his rooms, and then he pictured how cheerless
they would look, and how little of comfort they contained. He had used
them only to dress and sleep in of late, and the distaste with which
he regarded the idea that he must go back to them to read and sit and
live in them, showed him how utterly his life had become bound up with
the house on Twenty-seventh Street.

"Where was he to go in the evening?" he asked himself, with pathetic
hopelessness, "or in the morning or afternoon for that matter?" Were
there to be no more of those journeys to picture-galleries and to the
big publishing houses, where they used to hover over the new book
counter and pull the books about, and make each other innumerable
presents of daintily bound volumes, until the clerks grew to know them
so well that they never went through the form of asking where the
books were to be sent? And those tete-a-tete luncheons at her house
when her mother was upstairs with a headache or a dressmaker, and the
long rides and walks in the Park in the afternoon, and the rush down
town to dress, only to return to dine with them, ten minutes late
always, and always with some new excuse, which was allowed if it was
clever, and frowned at if it was common-place--was all this really
over?

Why, the town had only run on because she was in it, and as he walked
the streets the very shop windows had suggested her to him--florists
only existed that he might send her flowers, and gowns and bonnets in
the milliners' windows were only pretty as they would become her; and
as for the theatres and the newspapers, they were only worth while as
they gave her pleasure. And he had given all this up, and for what, he
asked himself, and why?

He could not answer that now. It was simply because he had been
surfeited with too much content, he replied, passionately. He had not
appreciated how happy he had been. She had been too kind, too
gracious. He had never known until he had quarrelled with her and lost
her how precious and dear she had been to him.

He was at the entrance to the Park now, and he strode on along the
walk, bitterly upbraiding himself for being worse than a criminal--a
fool, a common blind mortal to whom a goddess had stooped.

He remembered with bitter regret a turn off the drive into which they
had wandered one day, a secluded, pretty spot with a circle of box
around it, and into the turf of which he had driven his stick, and
claimed it for them both by the right of discovery. And he recalled
how they had used to go there, just out of sight of their friends in
the ride, and sit and chatter on a green bench beneath a bush of box,
like any nursery maid and her young man, while her groom stood at the
brougham door in the bridle-path beyond. He had broken off a sprig of
the box one day and given it to her, and she had kissed it foolishly,
and laughed, and hidden it in the folds of her riding-skirt, in
burlesque fear lest the guards should arrest them for breaking the
much-advertised ordinance.

And he remembered with a miserable smile how she had delighted him
with her account of her adventure to her mother, and described them as
fleeing down the Avenue with their treasure, pursued by a squadron of
mounted policemen.

This and a hundred other of the foolish, happy fancies they had shared
in common came back to him, and he remembered how she had stopped one
cold afternoon just outside of this favorite spot, beside an open iron
grating sunk in the path, into which the rain had washed the autumn
leaves, and pretended it was a steam radiator, and held her slim
gloved hands out over it as if to warm them.

How absurdly happy she used to make him, and how light-hearted she had
been! He determined suddenly and sentimentally to go to that secret
place now, and bury the engagement ring she had handed back to him
under that bush as he had buried his hopes of happiness, and he
pictured how some day when he was dead she would read of this in his
will, and go and dig up the ring, and remember and forgive him. He
struck off from the walk across the turf straight toward this dell,
taking the ring from his waistcoat pocket and clinching it in his
hand. He was walking quickly with rapt interest in this idea of
abnegation when he noticed, unconsciously at first and then with a
start, the familiar outlines and colors of her brougham drawn up in
the drive not twenty yards from their old meeting-place. He could not
be mistaken; he knew the horses well enough, and there was old Wallis
on the box and young Wallis on the path.

He stopped breathlessly, and then tipped on cautiously, keeping the
encircling line of bushes between him and the carriage. And then he
saw through the leaves that there was some one in the place, and that
it was she. He stopped, confused and amazed. He could not comprehend
it. She must have driven to the place immediately on his departure.
But why? And why to that place of all others?

He parted the bushes with his hands, and saw her lovely and sweet-
looking as she had always been, standing under the box bush beside the
bench, and breaking off one of the green branches. The branch parted
and the stem flew back to its place again, leaving a green sprig in
her hand. She turned at that moment directly toward him, and he could
see from his hiding-place how she lifted the leaves to her lips, and
that a tear was creeping down her cheek.

Then he dashed the bushes aside with both arms, and with a cry that no
one but she heard sprang toward her.

Young Van Bibber stopped his mail phaeton in front of the club, and
went inside to recuperate, and told how he had seen them driving home
through the Park in her brougham and unchaperoned.

"Which I call very bad form," said the punctilious Van Bibber, "even
though they are engaged."




MY DISREPUTABLE FRIEND, MR. RAEGEN


Rags Raegen was out of his element. The water was his proper element--
the water of the East River by preference. And when it came to
"running the roofs," as he would have himself expressed it, he was
"not in it."

On those other occasions when he had been followed by the police, he
had raced them toward the river front and had dived boldly in from the
wharf, leaving them staring blankly and in some alarm as to his
safety. Indeed, three different men in the precinct, who did not know
of young Raegen's aquatic prowess, had returned to the station-house
and seriously reported him to the sergeant as lost, and regretted
having driven a citizen into the river, where he had been
unfortunately drowned. It was even told how, on one occasion, when
hotly followed, young Raegen had dived off Wakeman's Slip, at East
Thirty-third Street, and had then swum back under water to the
landing-steps, while the policeman and a crowd of stevedores stood
watching for him to reappear where he had sunk. It is further related
that he had then, in a spirit of recklessness, and in the possibility
of the policeman's failing to recognize him, pushed his way through
the crowd from the rear and plunged in to rescue the supposedly
drowned man. And that after two or three futile attempts to find his
own corpse, he had climbed up on the dock and told the officer that he
had touched the body sticking in the mud. And, as a result of this
fiction, the river-police dragged the river-bed around Wakeman's Slip
with grappling irons for four hours, while Rags sat on the wharf and
directed their movements.

But on this present occasion the police were standing between him and
the river, and so cut off his escape in that direction, and as they
had seen him strike McGonegal and had seen McGonegal fall, he had to
run for it and seek refuge on the roofs. What made it worse was that
he was not in his own hunting-grounds, but in McGonegal's, and while
any tenement on Cherry Street would have given him shelter, either for
love of him or fear of him, these of Thirty-third Street were against
him and "all that Cherry Street gang," while "Pike" McGonegal was
their darling and their hero. And, if Rags had known it, any tenement
on the block was better than Case's, into which he first turned, for
Case's was empty and untenanted, save in one or two rooms, and the
opportunities for dodging from one to another were in consequence very
few. But he could not know this, and so he plunged into the dark hall-
way and sprang up the first four flights of stairs, three steps at a
jump, with one arm stretched out in front of him, for it was very dark
and the turns were short. On the fourth floor he fell headlong over a
bucket with a broom sticking in it, and cursed whoever left it there.
There was a ladder leading from the sixth floor to the roof, and he
ran up this and drew it after him as he fell forward out of the wooden
trap that opened on the flat tin roof like a companion-way of a ship.
The chimneys would have hidden him, but there was a policeman's helmet
coming up from another companion-way, and he saw that the Italians
hanging out of the windows of the other tenements were pointing at him
and showing him to the officer. So he hung by his hands and dropped
back again. It was not much of a fall, but it jarred him, and the race
he had already run had nearly taken his breath from him. For Rags did
not live a life calculated to fit young men for sudden trials of
speed.

He stumbled back down the narrow stairs, and, with a vivid
recollection of the bucket he had already fallen upon, felt his way
cautiously with his hands and with one foot stuck out in front of him.
If he had been in his own bailiwick, he would have rather enjoyed the
tense excitement of the chase than otherwise, for there he was at home
and knew all the cross-cuts and where to find each broken paling in
the roof-fences, and all the traps in the roofs. But here he was
running in a maze, and what looked like a safe passage-way might throw
him head on into the outstretched arms of the officers.

And while he felt his way his mind was terribly acute to the fact that
as yet no door on any of the landings had been thrown open to him,
either curiously or hospitably as offering a place of refuge. He did
not want to be taken, but in spite of this he was quite cool, and so,
when he heard quick, heavy footsteps beating up the stairs, he stopped
himself suddenly by placing one hand on the side of the wall and the
other on the banister and halted, panting. He could distinguish from
below the high voices of women and children and excited men in the
street, and as the steps came nearer he heard some one lowering the
ladder he had thrown upon the roof to the sixth floor and preparing to
descend. "Ah!" snarled Raegen, panting and desperate, "youse think you
have me now, sure, don't you?" It rather frightened him to find the
house so silent, for, save the footsteps of the officers, descending
and ascending upon him, he seemed to be the only living person in all
the dark, silent building.

He did not want to fight.

He was under heavy bonds already to keep the peace, and this last had
surely been in self-defence, and he felt he could prove it. What he
wanted now was to get away, to get back to his own people and to lie
hidden in his own cellar or garret, where they would feed and guard
him until the trouble was over. And still, like the two ends of a
vise, the representatives of the law were closing in upon him. He
turned the knob of the door opening to the landing on which he stood,
and tried to push it in, but it was locked. Then he stepped quickly to
the door on the opposite side and threw his shoulder against it. The
door opened, and he stumbled forward sprawling. The room in which he
had taken refuge was almost bare, and very dark; but in a little room
leading from it he saw a pile of tossed-up bedding on the floor, and
he dived at this as though it was water, and crawled far under it
until he reached the wall beyond, squirming on his face and stomach,
and flattening out his arms and legs. Then he lay motionless, holding
back his breath, and listening to the beating of his heart and to the
footsteps on the stairs. The footsteps stopped on the landing leading
to the outer room, and he could hear the murmur of voices as the two
men questioned one another. Then the door was kicked open, and there
was a long silence, broken sharply by the click of a revolver.

"Maybe he's in there," said a bass voice. The men stamped across the
floor leading into the dark room in which he lay, and halted at the
entrance. They did not stand there over a moment before they turned
and moved away again; but to Raegen, lying with blood-vessels choked,
and with his hand pressed across his mouth, it seemed as if they had
been contemplating and enjoying his agony for over an hour. "I was in
this place not more than twelve hours ago," said one of them easily.
"I come in to take a couple out for fighting. They were yelling
'murder' and 'police,' and breaking things; but they went quiet
enough. The man is a stevedore, I guess, and him and his wife used to
get drunk regular and carry on up here every night or so. They got
thirty days on the Island."

"Who's taking care of the rooms?" asked the bass voice. The first
voice said he guessed "no one was," and added: "There ain't much to
take care of, that I can see." "That's so," assented the bass voice.
"Well," he went on briskly, "he's not here; but he's in the building,
sure, for he put back when he seen me coming over the roof. And he
didn't pass me, neither, I know that, anyway," protested the bass
voice. Then the bass voice said that he must have slipped into the
flat below, and added something that Raegen could not hear distinctly,
about Schaffer on the roof, and their having him safe enough, as that
red-headed cop from the Eighteenth Precinct was watching on the
street. They closed the door behind them, and their footsteps
clattered down the stairs, leaving the big house silent and apparently
deserted. Young Raegen raised his head, and let his breath escape with
a great gasp of relief, as when he had been a long time under water,
and cautiously rubbed the perspiration out of his eyes and from his
forehead. It had been a cruelly hot, close afternoon, and the stifling
burial under the heavy bedding, and the excitement, had left him
feverishly hot and trembling. It was already growing dark outside,
although he could not know that until he lifted the quilts an inch or
two and peered up at the dirty window-panes. He was afraid to rise, as
yet, and flattened himself out with an impatient sigh, as he gathered
the bedding over his head again and held back his breath to listen.
There may have been a minute or more of absolute silence in which he
lay there, and then his blood froze to ice in his veins, his breath
stopped, and he heard, with a quick gasp of terror, the sound of
something crawling toward him across the floor of the outer room. The
instinct of self-defence moved him first to leap to his feet, and to
face and fight it, and then followed as quickly a foolish sense of
safety in his hiding-place; and he called upon his greatest strength,
and, by his mere brute will alone, forced his forehead down to the
bare floor and lay rigid, though his nerves jerked with unknown,
unreasoning fear. And still he heard the sound of this living thing
coming creeping toward him until the instinctive terror that shook him
overcame his will, and he threw the bed-clothes from him with a hoarse
cry, and sprang up trembling to his feet, with his back against the
wall, and with his arms thrown out in front of him wildly, and with
the willingness in them and the power in them to do murder.

The room was very dark, but the windows of the one beyond let in a
little stream of light across the floor, and in this light he saw
moving toward him on its hands and knees a little baby who smiled and
nodded at him with a pleased look of recognition and kindly welcome.

The fear upon Raegen had been so strong and the reaction was so great
that he dropped to a sitting posture on the heap of bedding and
laughed long and weakly, and still with a feeling in his heart that
this apparition was something strangely unreal and menacing.

[Illustration with caption: He sprang up trembling to his feet.]

But the baby seemed well pleased with his laughter, and stopped to
throw back its head and smile and coo and laugh gently with him as
though the joke was a very good one which they shared in common. Then
it struggled solemnly to its feet and came pattering toward him on a
run, with both bare arms held out, and with a look of such confidence
in him, and welcome in its face, that Raegen stretched out his arms
and closed the baby's fingers fearfully and gently in his own.

He had never seen so beautiful a child. There was dirt enough on its
hands and face, and its torn dress was soiled with streaks of coal and
ashes. The dust of the floor had rubbed into its bare knees, but the
face was like no other face that Rags had ever seen. And then it
looked at him as though it trusted him, and just as though they had
known each other at some time long before, but the eyes of the baby
somehow seemed to hurt him so that he had to turn his face away, and
when he looked again it was with a strangely new feeling of
dissatisfaction with himself and of wishing to ask pardon. They were
wonderful eyes, black and rich, and with a deep superiority of
knowledge in them, a knowledge that seemed to be above the knowledge
of evil; and when the baby smiled at him, the eyes smiled too with
confidence and tenderness in them that in some way frightened Rags and
made him move uncomfortably. "Did you know that youse scared me so
that I was going to kill you?" whispered Rags, apologetically, as he
carefully held the baby from him at arm's length. "Did you?" But the
baby only smiled at this and reached out its hand and stroked Rag's
cheek with its fingers. There was something so wonderfully soft and
sweet in this that Rags drew the baby nearer and gave a quick, strange
gasp of pleasure as it threw its arms around his neck and brought the
face up close to his chin and hugged him tightly. The baby's arms were
very soft and plump, and its cheek and tangled hair were warm and
moist with perspiration, and the breath that fell on Raegen's face was
sweeter than anything he had ever known. He felt wonderfully and for
some reason uncomfortably happy, but the silence was oppressive.

"What's your name, little 'un?" said Rags. The baby ran its arms more
closely around Raegen's neck and did not speak, unless its cooing in
Raegen's ear was an answer. "What did you say your name was?"
persisted Raegen, in a whisper. The baby frowned at this and stopped
cooing long enough to say: "Marg'ret," mechanically and without
apparently associating the name with herself or anything else.
"Margaret, eh!" said Raegen, with grave consideration. "It's a very
pretty name," he added, politely, for he could not shake off the
feeling that he was in the presence of a superior being. "An' what did
you say your dad's name was?" asked Raegen, awkwardly. But this was
beyond the baby's patience or knowledge, and she waived the question
aside with both arms and began to beat a tattoo gently with her two
closed fists on Raegen's chin and throat. "You're mighty strong now,
ain't you?" mocked the young giant, laughing. "Perhaps you don't know,
Missie," he added, gravely, "that your dad and mar are doing time on
the Island, and you won't see 'em again for a month." No, the baby did
not know this nor care apparently; she seemed content with Rags and
with his company. Sometimes she drew away and looked at him long and
dubiously, and this cut Rags to the heart, and he felt guilty, and
unreasonably anxious until she smiled reassuringly again and ran back
into his arms, nestling her face against his and stroking his rough
chin wonderingly with her little fingers.

Rags forgot the lateness of the night and the darkness that fell upon
the room in the interest of this strange entertainment, which was so
much more absorbing, and so much more innocent than any other he had
ever known. He almost forgot the fact that he lay in hiding, that he
was surrounded by unfriendly neighbors, and that at any moment the
representatives of local justice might come in and rudely lead him
away. For this reason he dared not make a light, but he moved his
position so that the glare from an electric lamp on the street outside
might fall across the baby's face, as it lay alternately dozing and
awakening, to smile up at him in the bend of his arm. Once it reached
inside the collar of his shirt and pulled out the scapular that hung
around his neck, and looked at it so long, and with such apparent
seriousness, that Rags was confirmed in his fear that this kindly
visitor was something more or less of a superhuman agent, and his
efforts to make this supposition coincide with the fact that the
angel's parents were on Blackwell's Island, proved one of the severest
struggles his mind had ever experienced. He had forgotten to feel
hungry, and the knowledge that he was acutely so, first came to him
with the thought that the baby must obviously be in greatest need of
food herself. This pained him greatly, and he laid his burden down
upon the bedding, and after slipping off his shoes, tip-toed his way
across the room on a foraging expedition after something she could
eat. There was a half of a ham-bone, and a half loaf of hard bread in
a cupboard, and on the table he found a bottle quite filled with
wretched whiskey. That the police had failed to see the baby had not
appealed to him in any way, but that they should have allowed this
last find to remain unnoticed pleased him intensely, not because it
now fell to him, but because they had been cheated of it. It really
struck him as so humorous that he stood laughing silently for several
minutes, slapping his thigh with every outward exhibition of the
keenest mirth. But when he found that the room and cupboard were bare
of anything else that might be eaten he sobered suddenly. It was very
hot, and though the windows were open, the perspiration stood upon his
face, and the foul close air that rose from the court and street below
made him gasp and pant for breath. He dipped a wash rag in the water
from the spigot in the hall, and filled a cup with it and bathed the
baby's face and wrists. She woke and sipped up the water from the cup
eagerly, and then looked up at him, as if to ask for something more.
Rags soaked the crusty bread in the water, and put it to the baby's
lips, but after nibbling at it eagerly she shook her head and looked
up at him again with such reproachful pleading in her eyes, that Rags
felt her silence more keenly than the worst abuse he had ever
received.

It hurt him so, that the pain brought tears to his eyes.

"Deary girl," he cried, "I'd give you anything you could think of if I
had it. But I can't get it, see? It ain't that I don't want to--good
Lord, little 'un, you don't think that, do you?"

The baby smiled at this, just as though she understood him, and
touched his face as if to comfort him, so that Rags felt that same
exquisite content again, which moved him so strangely whenever the
child caressed him, and which left him soberly wondering. Then the
baby crawled up onto his lap and dropped asleep, while Rags sat
motionless and fanned her with a folded newspaper, stopping every now
and then to pass the damp cloth over her warm face and arms. It was
quite late now. Outside he could hear the neighbors laughing and
talking on the roofs, and when one group sang hilariously to an
accordion, he cursed them under his breath for noisy, drunken fools,
and in his anger lest they should disturb the child in his arms,
expressed an anxious hope that they would fall off and break their
useless necks. It grew silent and much cooler as the night ran out,
but Rags still sat immovable, shivering slightly every now and then
and cautiously stretching his stiff legs and body. The arm that held
the child grew stiff and numb with the light burden, but he took a
fierce pleasure in the pain, and became hardened to it, and at last
fell into an uneasy slumber from which he awoke to pass his hands
gently over the soft yielding body, and to draw it slowly and closer
to him. And then, from very weariness, his eyes closed and his head
fell back heavily against the wall, and the man and the child in his
arms slept peacefully in the dark corner of the deserted tenement.

The sun rose hissing out of the East River, a broad, red disc of heat.
It swept the cross-streets of the city as pitilessly as the search-
light of a man-of-war sweeps the ocean. It blazed brazenly into open
windows, and changed beds into gridirons on which the sleepers tossed
and turned and woke unrefreshed and with throats dry and parched. Its
glare awakened Rags into a startled belief that the place about him
was on fire, and he stared wildly until the child in his arms brought
him back to the knowledge of where he was. He ached in every joint and
limb, and his eyes smarted with the dry heat, but the baby concerned
him most, for she was breathing with hard, long, irregular gasps, her
mouth was open and her absurdly small fists were clenched, and around
her closed eyes were deep blue rings. Rags felt a cold rush of fear
and uncertainty come over him as he stared about him helplessly for
aid. He had seen babies look like this before, in the tenements; they
were like this when the young doctors of the Health Board climbed to
the roofs to see them, and they were like this, only quiet and still,
when the ambulance came clattering up the narrow streets, and bore
them away. Rags carried the baby into the outer room, where the sun
had not yet penetrated, and laid her down gently on the coverlets;
then he let the water in the sink run until it was fairly cool, and
with this bathed the baby's face and hands and feet, and lifted a cup
of the water to her open lips. She woke at this and smiled again, but
very faintly, and when she looked at him he felt fearfully sure that
she did not know him, and that she was looking through and past him at
something he could not see.

He did not know what to do, and he wanted to do so much. Milk was the
only thing he was quite sure babies cared for, but in want of this he
made a mess of bits of the dry ham and crumbs of bread, moistened with
the raw whiskey, and put it to her lips on the end of a spoon. The
baby tasted this, and pushed his hand away, and then looked up and
gave a feeble cry, and seemed to say, as plainly as a grown woman
could have said or written, "It isn't any use, Rags. You are very good
to me, but, indeed, I cannot do it. Don't worry, please; I don't blame
you."

"Great Lord," gasped Rags, with a queer choking in his throat, "but
ain't she got grit." Then he bethought him of the people who he still
believed inhabited the rest of the tenement, and he concluded that as
the day was yet so early they might still be asleep, and that while
they slept, he could "lift"--as he mentally described the act--
whatever they might have laid away for breakfast. Excited with this
hope, he ran noiselessly down the stairs in his bare feet, and tried
the doors of the different landings. But each he found open and each
room bare and deserted. Then it occurred to him that at this hour he
might even risk a sally into the street. He had money with him, and
the milk-carts and bakers' wagons must be passing every minute. He ran
back to get the money out of his coat, delighted with the chance and
chiding himself for not having dared to do it sooner. He stood over
the baby a moment before he left the room, and flushed like a girl as
he stooped and kissed one of the bare arms. "I'm going out to get you
some breakfast," he said. "I won't be gone long, but if I should," he
added, as he paused and shrugged his shoulders, "I'll send the
sergeant after you from the station-house. If I only wasn't under
bonds," he muttered, as he slipped down the stairs. "If it wasn't for
that they couldn't give me more'n a month at the most, even knowing
all they do of me. It was only a street fight, anyway, and there was
some there that must have seen him pull his pistol." He stopped at the
top of the first flight of stairs and sat down to wait. He could see
below the top of the open front door, the pavement and a part of the
street beyond, and when he heard the rattle of an approaching cart he
ran on down and then, with an oath, turned and broke up-stairs again.
He had seen the ward detectives standing together on the opposite side
of the street.

"Wot are they doing out a bed at this hour?" he demanded angrily.
"Don't they make trouble enough through the day, without prowling
around before decent people are up? I wonder, now, if they're after
me." He dropped on his knees when he reached the room where the baby
lay, and peered cautiously out of the window at the detectives, who
had been joined by two other men, with whom they were talking
earnestly. Raegen knew the new-comers for two of McGonegal's friends,
and concluded, with a momentary flush of pride and self-importance,
that the detectives were forced to be up at this early hour solely on
his account. But this was followed by the afterthought that he must
have hurt McGonegal seriously, and that he was wanted in consequence
very much. This disturbed him most, he was surprised to find, because
it precluded his going forth in search of food. "I guess I can't get
you that milk I was looking for," he said, jocularly, to the baby, for
the excitement elated him. "The sun outside isn't good for me health."
The baby settled herself in his arms and slept again, which sobered
Rags, for he argued it was a bad sign, and his own ravenous appetite
warned him how the child suffered. When he again offered her the
mixture he had prepared for her, she took it eagerly, and Rags
breathed a sigh of satisfaction. Then he ate some of the bread and ham
himself and swallowed half the whiskey, and stretched out beside the
child and fanned her while she slept. It was something strangely
incomprehensible to Rags that he should feel so keen a satisfaction in
doing even this little for her, but he gave up wondering, and forgot
everything else in watching the strange beauty of the sleeping baby
and in the odd feeling of responsibility and self-respect she had
brought to him.

He did not feel it coming on, or he would have fought against it, but
the heat of the day and the sleeplessness of the night before, and the
fumes of the whiskey on his empty stomach, drew him unconsciously into
a dull stupor, so that the paper fan slipped from his hand, and he
sank back on the bedding into a heavy sleep. When he awoke it was
nearly dusk and past six o'clock, as he knew by the newsboys calling
the sporting extras on the street below. He sprang up, cursing
himself, and filled with bitter remorse.

"I'm a drunken fool, that's what I am," said Rags, savagely. "I've let
her lie here all day in the heat with no one to watch her." Margaret
was breathing so softly that he could hardly discern any life at all,
and his heart almost stopped with fear. He picked her up and fanned
and patted her into wakefulness again and then turned desperately to
the window and looked down. There was no one he knew or who knew him
as far as he could tell on the street, and he determined recklessly to
risk another sortie for food.

"Why, it's been near two days that child's gone without eating," he
said, with keen self-reproach, "and here you've let her suffer to save
yourself a trip to the Island. You're a hulking big loafer, you are,"
he ran on, muttering, "and after her coming to you and taking notice
of you and putting her face to yours like an angel." He slipped off
his shoes and picked his way cautiously down the stairs.

As he reached the top of the first flight a newsboy passed, calling
the evening papers, and shouted something which Rags could not
distinguish. He wished he could get a copy of the paper. It might tell
him, he thought, something about himself. The boy was coming nearer,
and Rags stopped and leaned forward to listen.

"Extry! Extry!" shouted the newsboy, running. "Sun, World, and Mail.
Full account of the murder of Pike McGonegal by Ragsey Raegen."

The lights in the street seemed to flash up suddenly and grow dim
again, leaving Rags blind and dizzy.

"Stop," he yelled, "stop. Murdered, no, by God, no," he cried,
staggering half-way down the stairs; "stop, stop!" But no one heard
Rags, and the sound of his own voice halted him. He sank back weak and
sick upon the top step of the stairs and beat his hands together upon
his head.

"It's a lie, it's a lie," he whispered, thickly. "I struck him in
self-defence, s'help me. I struck him in self-defence. He drove me to
it. He pulled his gun on me. I done it in self-defence."

And then the whole appearance of the young tough changed, and the
terror and horror that had showed on his face turned to one of low
sharpness and evil cunning. His lips drew together tightly and he
breathed quickly through his nostrils, while his fingers locked and
unlocked around his knees. All that he had learned on the streets and
wharves and roof-tops, all that pitiable experience and dangerous
knowledge that had made him a leader and a hero among the thieves and
bullies of the river-front he called to his assistance now. He faced
the fact flatly and with the cool consideration of an uninterested
counsellor. He knew that the history of his life was written on Police
Court blotters from the day that he was ten years old, and with
pitiless detail; that what friends he had he held more by fear than by
affection, and that his enemies, who were many, only wanted just such
a chance as this to revenge injuries long suffered and bitterly
cherished, and that his only safety lay in secret and instant flight.
The ferries were watched, of course; he knew that the depots, too,
were covered by the men whose only duty was to watch the coming and to
halt the departing criminal. But he knew of one old man who was too
wise to ask questions and who would row him over the East River to
Astoria, and of another on the west side whose boat was always at the
disposal of silent white-faced young men who might come at any hour of
the night or morning, and whom he would pilot across to the Jersey
shore and keep well away from the lights of the passing ferries and
the green lamp of the police boat. And once across, he had only to
change his name and write for money to be forwarded to that name, and
turn to work until the thing was covered up and forgotten. He rose to
his feet in his full strength again, and intensely and agreeably
excited with the danger, and possibly fatal termination, of his
adventure, and then there fell upon him, with the suddenness of a
blow, the remembrance of the little child lying on the dirty bedding
in the room above.

"I can't do it," he muttered fiercely; "I can't do it," he cried, as
if he argued with some other presence. "There's a rope around me neck,
and the chances are all against me; it's every man for himself and no
favor." He threw his arms out before him as if to push the thought
away from him and ran his fingers through his hair and over his face.
All of his old self rose in him and mocked him for a weak fool, and
showed him just how great his personal danger was, and so he turned
and dashed forward on a run, not only to the street, but as if to
escape from the other self that held him back. He was still without
his shoes, and in his bare feet, and he stopped as he noticed this and
turned to go up stairs for them, and then he pictured to himself the
baby lying as he had left her, weakly unconscious and with dark rims
around her eyes, and he asked himself excitedly what he would do, if,
on his return, she should wake and smile and reach out her hands to
him.

"I don't dare go back," he said, breathlessly. "I don't dare do it;
killing's too good for the likes of Pike McGonegal, but I'm not
fighting babies. An' maybe, if I went back, maybe I wouldn't have the
nerve to leave her; I can't do it," he muttered, "I don't dare go
back." But still he did not stir, but stood motionless, with one hand
trembling on the stair-rail and the other clenched beside him, and so
fought it on alone in the silence of the empty building.

The lights in the stores below came out one by one, and the minutes
passed into half-hours, and still he stood there with the noise of the
streets coming up to him below speaking of escape and of a long life
of ill-regulated pleasures, and up above him the baby lay in the
darkness and reached out her hands to him in her sleep.

The surly old sergeant of the Twenty-first Precinct station-house had
read the evening papers through for the third time and was dozing in
the fierce lights of the gas-jet over the high desk when a young man
with a white, haggard face came in from the street with a baby in his
arms.

"I want to see the woman thet look after the station-house--quick," he
said.

The surly old sergeant did not like the peremptory tone of the young
man nor his general appearance, for he had no hat, nor coat, and his
feet were bare; so he said, with deliberate dignity, that the char-
woman was up-stairs lying down, and what did the young man want with
her? "This child," said the visitor, in a queer thick voice, "she's
sick. The heat's come over her, and she ain't had anything to eat for
two days, an' she's starving. Ring the bell for the matron, will yer,
and send one of your men around for the house surgeon." The sergeant
leaned forward comfortably on his elbows, with his hands under his
chin so that the gold lace on his cuffs shone effectively in the
gaslight. He believed he had a sense of humor and he chose this
unfortunate moment to exhibit it.

"Did you take this for a dispensary, young man?" he asked; "or," he
continued, with added facetiousness, "a foundling hospital?"

The young man made a savage spring at the barrier in front of the high
desk. "Damn you," he panted, "ring that bell, do you hear me, or I'll
pull you off that seat and twist your heart out."

The baby cried at this sudden outburst, and Rags fell back, patting it
with his hand and muttering between his closed teeth. The sergeant
called to the men of the reserve squad in the reading-room beyond, and
to humor this desperate visitor, sounded the gong for the janitress.
The reserve squad trooped in leisurely with the playing-cards in their
hands and with their pipes in their mouths.

"This man," growled the sergeant, pointing with the end of his cigar
to Rags, "is either drunk, or crazy, or a bit of both."

The char-woman came down stairs majestically, in a long, loose
wrapper, fanning herself with a palm-leaf fan, but when she saw the
child, her majesty dropped from her like a cloak, and she ran toward
her and caught the baby up in her arms. "You poor little thing," she
murmured, "and, oh, how beautiful!" Then she whirled about on the men
of the reserve squad: "You, Conners," she said, "run up to my room and
get the milk out of my ice-chest; and Moore, put on your coat and go
around and tell the surgeon I want to see him. And one of you crack
some ice up fine in a towel. Take it out of the cooler. Quick, now."

Raegen came up to her fearfully. "Is she very sick?" he begged; "she
ain't going to die, is she?"

"Of course not," said the woman, promptly, "but she's down with the
heat, and she hasn't been properly cared for; the child looks half-
starved. Are you her father?" she asked, sharply. But Rags did not
speak, for at the moment she had answered his question and had said
the baby would not die, he had reached out swiftly, and taken the
child out of her arms and held it hard against his breast, as though
he had lost her and some one had been just giving her back to him.

His head was bending over hers, and so he did not see Wade and
Heffner, the two ward detectives, as they came in from the street,
looking hot, and tired, and anxious. They gave a careless glance at
the group, and then stopped with a start, and one of them gave a long,
low whistle.

"Well," exclaimed Wade, with a gasp of surprise and relief. "So
Raegen, you're here, after all, are you? Well, you did give us a
chase, you did. Who took you?"

The men of the reserve squad, when they heard the name of the man for
whom the whole force had been looking for the past two days, shifted
their positions slightly, and looked curiously at Rags, and the woman
stopped pouring out the milk from the bottle in her hand, and stared
at him in frank astonishment. Raegen threw back his head and
shoulders, and ran his eyes coldly over the faces of the semicircle of
men around him.

"Who took me?" he began defiantly, with a swagger of braggadocio, and
then, as though it were hardly worth while, and as though the presence
of the baby lifted him above everything else, he stopped, and raised
her until her cheek touched his own. It rested there a moment, while
Rag stood silent.

"Who took me?" he repeated, quietly, and without lifting his eyes from
the baby's face. "Nobody took me," he said. "I gave myself up."

One morning, three months later, when Raegen had stopped his ice-cart
in front of my door, I asked him whether at any time he had ever
regretted what he had done.

"Well, sir," he said, with easy superiority, "seeing that I've shook
the gang, and that the Society's decided her folks ain't fit to take
care of her, we can't help thinking we are better off, see?

[Illustration with caption: She'd reach out her hands and kiss me.]

"But, as for my ever regretting it, why, even when things was at the
worst, when the case was going dead against me, and before that cop,
you remember, swore to McGonegal's drawing the pistol, and when I used
to sit in the Tombs expecting I'd have to hang for it, well, even
then, they used to bring her to see me every day, and when they'd lift
her up, and she'd reach out her hands and kiss me through the bars,
why--they could have took me out and hung me, and been damned to 'em,
for all I'd have cared."




THE OTHER WOMAN


Young Latimer stood on one of the lower steps of the hall stairs,
leaning with one hand on the broad railing and smiling down at her.
She had followed him from the drawing-room and had stopped at the
entrance, drawing the curtains behind her, and making, unconsciously,
a dark background for her head and figure. He thought he had never
seen her look more beautiful, nor that cold, fine air of thorough
breeding about her which was her greatest beauty to him, more strongly
in evidence.

"Well, sir," she said, "why don't you go?"

He shifted his position slightly and leaned more comfortably upon the
railing, as though he intended to discuss it with her at some length.

"How can I go," he said, argumentatively, "with you standing there--
looking like that?"

"I really believe," the girl said, slowly, "that he is afraid; yes, he
is afraid. And you always said," she added, turning to him, "you were
so brave."

"Oh, I am sure I never said that," exclaimed the young man, calmly. "I
may be brave, in fact, I am quite brave, but I never said I was. Some
one must have told you."

"Yes, he is afraid," she said, nodding her head to the tall clock
across the hall, "he is temporizing and trying to save time. And
afraid of a man, too, and such a good man who would not hurt any one."

"You know a bishop is always a very difficult sort of a person," he
said, "and when he happens to be your father, the combination is just
a bit awful. Isn't it now? And especially when one means to ask him
for his daughter. You know it isn't like asking him to let one smoke
in his study."

"If I loved a girl," she said, shaking her head and smiling up at him,
"I wouldn't be afraid of the whole world; that's what they say in
books, isn't it? I would be so bold and happy."

"Oh, well, I'm bold enough," said the young man, easily; "if I had not
been, I never would have asked you to marry me; and I'm happy enough--
that's because I did ask you. But what if he says no," continued the
youth; "what if he says he has greater ambitions for you, just as they
say in books, too. What will you do? Will you run away with me? I can
borrow a coach just as they used to do, and we can drive off through
the Park and be married, and come back and ask his blessing on our
knees--unless he should overtake us on the elevated."

"That," said the girl, decidedly, "is flippant, and I'm going to leave
you. I never thought to marry a man who would be frightened at the
very first. I am greatly disappointed."

She stepped back into the drawing-room and pulled the curtains to
behind her, and then opened them again and whispered, "Please don't be
long," and disappeared. He waited, smiling, to see if she would make
another appearance, but she did not, and he heard her touch the keys
of the piano at the other end of the drawing-room. And so, still
smiling and with her last words sounding in his ears, he walked slowly
up the stairs and knocked at the door of the bishop's study. The
bishop's room was not ecclesiastic in its character. It looked much
like the room of any man of any calling who cared for his books and to
have pictures about him, and copies of the beautiful things he had
seen on his travels. There were pictures of the Virgin and the Child,
but they were those that are seen in almost any house, and there were
etchings and plaster casts, and there were hundreds of books, and dark
red curtains, and an open fire that lit up the pots of brass with
ferns in them, and the blue and white plaques on the top of the
bookcase. The bishop sat before his writing-table, with one hand
shading his eyes from the light of a red-covered lamp, and looked up
and smiled pleasantly and nodded as the young man entered. He had a
very strong face, with white hair hanging at the side, but was still a
young man for one in such a high office. He was a man interested in
many things, who could talk to men of any profession or to the mere
man of pleasure, and could interest them in what he said, and force
their respect and liking. And he was very good, and had, they said,
seen much trouble.

"I am afraid I interrupted you," said the young man, tentatively.

"No, I have interrupted myself," replied the bishop. "I don't seem to
make this clear to myself," he said, touching the paper in front of
him, "and so I very much doubt if I am going to make it clear to any
one else. However," he added, smiling, as he pushed the manuscript to
one side, "we are not going to talk about that now. What have you to
tell me that is new?"

The younger man glanced up quickly at this, but the bishop's face
showed that his words had had no ulterior meaning, and that he
suspected nothing more serious to come than the gossip of the clubs or
a report of the local political fight in which he was keenly
interested, or on their mission on the East Side. But it seemed an
opportunity to Latimer.

"I _have_ something new to tell you," he said, gravely, and with his
eyes turned toward the open fire, "and I don't know how to do it
exactly. I mean I don't just know how it is generally done or how to
tell it best." He hesitated and leaned forward, with his hands locked
in front of him, and his elbows resting on his knees. He was not in
the least frightened. The bishop had listened to many strange stories,
to many confessions, in this same study, and had learned to take them
as a matter of course; but to-night something in the manner of the
young man before him made him stir uneasily, and he waited for him to
disclose the object of his visit with some impatience.

"I will suppose, sir," said young Latimer, finally, "that you know me
rather well--I mean you know who my people are, and what I am doing
here in New York, and who my friends are, and what my work amounts to.
You have let me see a great deal of you, and I have appreciated your
doing so very much; to so young a man as myself it has been a great
compliment, and it has been of great benefit to me. I know that better
than any one else. I say this because unless you had shown me this
confidence it would have been almost impossible for me to say to you
what I am going to say now. But you have allowed me to come here
frequently, and to see you and talk with you here in your study, and
to see even more of your daughter. Of course, sir, you did not suppose
that I came here only to see you. I came here because I found that if
I did not see Miss Ellen for a day, that that day was wasted, and that
I spent it uneasily and discontentedly, and the necessity of seeing
her even more frequently has grown so great that I cannot come here as
often as I seem to want to come unless I am engaged to her, unless I
come as her husband that is to be." The young man had been speaking
very slowly and picking his words, but now he raised his head and ran
on quickly.

"I have spoken to her and told her how I love her, and she has told me
that she loves me, and that if you will not oppose us, will marry me.
That is the news I have to tell you, sir. I don't know but that I
might have told it differently, but that is it. I need not urge on you
my position and all that, because I do not think that weighs with you;
but I do tell you that I love Ellen so dearly that, though I am not
worthy of her, of course, I have no other pleasure than to give her
pleasure and to try to make her happy. I have the power to do it; but
what is much more, I have the wish to do it; it is all I think of now,
and all that I can ever think of. What she thinks of me you must ask
her; but what she is to me neither she can tell you nor do I believe
that I myself could make you understand." The young man's face was
flushed and eager, and as he finished speaking he raised his head and
watched the bishop's countenance anxiously. But the older man's face
was hidden by his hand as he leaned with his elbow on his writing-
table. His other hand was playing with a pen, and when he began to
speak, which he did after a long pause, he still turned it between his
fingers and looked down at it.

"I suppose," he said, as softly as though he were speaking to himself,
"that I should have known this; I suppose that I should have been
better prepared to hear it. But it is one of those things which men
put off--I mean those men who have children, put off--as they do
making their wills, as something that is in the future and that may be
shirked until it comes. We seem to think that our daughters will live
with us always, just as we expect to live on ourselves until death
comes one day and startles us and finds us unprepared." He took down
his hand and smiled gravely at the younger man with an evident effort,
and said, "I did not mean to speak so gloomily, but you see my point
of view must be different from yours. And she says she loves you, does
she?" he added, gently.

Young Latimer bowed his head and murmured something inarticulately in
reply, and then held his head erect again and waited, still watching
the bishop's face.

"I think she might have told me," said the older man; "but then I
suppose this is the better way. I am young enough to understand that
the old order changes, that the customs of my father's time differ
from those of to-day. And there is no alternative, I suppose," he
said, shaking his head. "I am stopped and told to deliver, and have no
choice. I will get used to it in time," he went on, "but it seems very
hard now. Fathers are selfish, I imagine, but she is all I have."

Young Latimer looked gravely into the fire and wondered how long it
would last. He could just hear the piano from below, and he was
anxious to return to her. And at the same time he was drawn toward the
older man before him, and felt rather guilty, as though he really were
robbing him. But at the bishop's next words he gave up any thought of
a speedy release, and settled himself in his chair.

"We are still to have a long talk," said the bishop. "There are many
things I must know, and of which I am sure you will inform me freely.
I believe there are some who consider me hard, and even narrow on
different points, but I do not think you will find me so, at least let
us hope not. I must confess that for a moment I almost hoped that you
might not be able to answer the questions I must ask you, but it was
only for a moment. I am only too sure you will not be found wanting,
and that the conclusion of our talk will satisfy us both. Yes, I am
confident of that."

His manner changed, nevertheless, and Latimer saw that he was now
facing a judge and not a plaintiff who had been robbed, and that he
was in turn the defendant. And still he was in no way frightened.

"I like you," the bishop said, "I like you very much. As you say
yourself, I have seen a great deal of you, because I have enjoyed your
society, and your views and talk were good and young and fresh, and
did me good. You have served to keep me in touch with the outside
world, a world of which I used to know at one time a great deal. I
know your people and I know you, I think, and many people have spoken
to me of you. I see why now. They, no doubt, understood what was
coming better than myself, and were meaning to reassure me concerning
you. And they said nothing but what was good of you. But there are
certain things of which no one can know but yourself, and concerning
which no other person, save myself, has a right to question you. You
have promised very fairly for my daughter's future; you have suggested
more than you have said, but I understood. You can give her many
pleasures which I have not been able to afford; she can get from you
the means of seeing more of this world in which she lives, of meeting
more people, and of indulging in her charities, or in her
extravagances, for that matter, as she wishes. I have no fear of her
bodily comfort; her life, as far as that is concerned, will be easier
and broader, and with more power for good. Her future, as I say, as
you say also, is assured; but I want to ask you this," the bishop
leaned forward and watched the young man anxiously, "you can protect
her in the future, but can you assure me that you can protect her from
the past?"

Young Latimer raised his eyes calmly and said, "I don't think I quite
understand."

"I have perfect confidence, I say," returned the bishop, "in you as
far as your treatment of Ellen is concerned in the future. You love
her and you would do everything to make the life of the woman you love
a happy one; but this is it, Can you assure me that there is nothing
in the past that may reach forward later and touch my daughter through
you--no ugly story, no oats that have been sowed, and no boomerang
that you have thrown wantonly and that has not returned--but which may
return?"

"I think I understand you now, sir," said the young man, quietly. "I
have lived," he began, "as other men of my sort have lived. You know
what that is, for you must have seen it about you at college, and
after that before you entered the Church. I judge so from your
friends, who were your friends then, I understand. You know how they
lived. I never went in for dissipation, if you mean that, because it
never attracted me. I am afraid I kept out of it not so much out of
respect for others as for respect for myself. I found my self-respect
was a very good thing to keep, and I rather preferred keeping it and
losing several pleasures that other men managed to enjoy, apparently
with free consciences. I confess I used to rather envy them. It is no
particular virtue on my part; the thing struck me as rather more
vulgar than wicked, and so I have had no wild oats to speak of; and no
woman, if that is what you mean, can write an anonymous letter, and no
man can tell you a story about me that he could not tell in my
presence."

There was something in the way the young man spoke which would have
amply satisfied the outsider, had he been present; but the bishop's
eyes were still unrelaxed and anxious. He made an impatient motion
with his hand.

"I know you too well, I hope," he said, "to think of doubting your
attitude in that particular. I know you are a gentleman, that is
enough for that; but there is something beyond these more common
evils. You see, I am terribly in earnest over this--you may think
unjustly so, considering how well I know you, but this child is my
only child. If her mother had lived, my responsibility would have been
less great; but, as it is, God has left her here alone to me in my
hands. I do not think He intended my duty should end when I had fed
and clothed her, and taught her to read and write. I do not think He
meant that I should only act as her guardian until the first man she
fancied fancied her. I must look to her happiness not only now when
she is with me, but I must assure myself of it when she leaves my
roof. These common sins of youth I acquit you of. Such things are
beneath you, I believe, and I did not even consider them. But there
are other toils in which men become involved, other evils or
misfortunes which exist, and which threaten all men who are young and
free and attractive in many ways to women, as well as men. You have
lived the life of the young man of this day. You have reached a place
in your profession when you can afford to rest and marry and assume
the responsibilities of marriage. You look forward to a life of
content and peace and honorable ambition--a life, with your wife at
your side, which is to last forty or fifty years. You consider where
you will be twenty years from now, at what point of your career you
may become a judge or give up practice; your perspective is unlimited;
you even think of the college to which you may send your son. It is a
long, quiet future that you are looking forward to, and you choose my
daughter as the companion for that future, as the one woman with whom
you could live content for that length of time. And it is in that
spirit that you come to me to-night and that you ask me for my
daughter. Now I am going to ask you one question, and as you answer
that I will tell you whether or not you can have Ellen for your wife.
You look forward, as I say, to many years of life, and you have chosen
her as best suited to live that period with you; but I ask you this,
and I demand that you answer me truthfully, and that you remember that
you are speaking to her father. Imagine that I had the power to tell
you, or rather that some superhuman agent could convince you, that you
had but a month to live, and that for what you did in that month you
would not be held responsible either by any moral law or any law made
by man, and that your life hereafter would not be influenced by your
conduct in that month, would you spend it, I ask you--and on your
answer depends mine--would you spend those thirty days, with death at
the end, with my daughter, or with some other woman of whom I know
nothing?"

Latimer sat for some time silent, until indeed, his silence assumed
such a significance that he raised his head impatiently and said with
a motion of the hand, "I mean to answer you in a minute; I want to be
sure that I understand."

The bishop bowed his head in assent, and for a still longer period the
men sat motionless. The clock in the corner seemed to tick more
loudly, and the dead coals dropping in the grate had a sharp,
aggressive sound. The notes of the piano that had risen from the room
below had ceased.

"If I understand you," said Latimer, finally, and his voice and his
face as he raised it were hard and aggressive, "you are stating a
purely hypothetical case. You wish to try me by conditions which do
not exist, which cannot exist. What justice is there, what right is
there, in asking me to say how I would act under circumstances which
are impossible, which lie beyond the limit of human experience? You
cannot judge a man by what he would do if he were suddenly robbed of
all his mental and moral training and of the habit of years. I am not
admitting, understand me, that if the conditions which you suggest did
exist that I would do one whit differently from what I will do if they
remain as they are. I am merely denying your right to put such a
question to me at all. You might just as well judge the shipwrecked
sailors on a raft who eat each other's flesh as you would judge a
sane, healthy man who did such a thing in his own home. Are you going
to condemn men who are ice-locked at the North Pole, or buried in the
heart of Africa, and who have given up all thought of return and are
half mad and wholly without hope, as you would judge ourselves? Are
they to be weighed and balanced as you and I are, sitting here within
the sound of the cabs outside and with a bake-shop around the corner?
What you propose could not exist, could never happen. I could never be
placed where I should have to make such a choice, and you have no
right to ask me what I would do or how I would act under conditions
that are super-human--you used the word yourself--where all that I
have held to be good and just and true would be obliterated. I would
be unworthy of myself, I would be unworthy of your daughter, if I
considered such a state of things for a moment, or if I placed my
hopes of marrying her on the outcome of such a test, and so, sir,"
said the young man, throwing back his head, "I must refuse to answer
you."

The bishop lowered his hand from before his eyes and sank back wearily
into his chair. "You have answered me," he said.

"You have no right to say that," cried the young man, springing to his
feet. "You have no right to suppose anything or to draw any
conclusions. I have not answered you." He stood with his head and
shoulders thrown back, and with his hands resting on his hips and with
the fingers working nervously at his waist.

"What you have said," replied the bishop, in a voice that had changed
strangely, and which was inexpressibly sad and gentle, "is merely a
curtain of words to cover up your true feeling. It would have been so
easy to have said, 'For thirty days or for life Ellen is the only
woman who has the power to make me happy.' You see that would have
answered me and satisfied me. But you did not say that," he added,
quickly, as the young man made a movement as if to speak.

"Well, and suppose this other woman did exist, what then?" demanded
Latimer. "The conditions you suggest are impossible; you must, you
will surely, sir, admit that."

"I do not know," replied the bishop, sadly; "I do not know. It may
happen that whatever obstacle there has been which has kept you from
her may be removed. It may be that she has married, it may be that she
has fallen so low that you cannot marry her. But if you have loved her
once, you may love her again; whatever it was that separated you in
the past, that separates you now, that makes you prefer my daughter to
her, may come to an end when you are married, when it will be too
late, and when only trouble can come of it, and Ellen would bear that
trouble. Can I risk that?"

"But I tell you it is impossible," cried the young man. "The woman is
beyond the love of any man, at least such a man as I am, or try to
be."

"Do you mean," asked the bishop, gently, and with an eager look of
hope, "that she is dead?"

Latimer faced the father for some seconds in silence. Then he raised
his head slowly. "No," he said, "I do not mean she is dead. No, she is
not dead."

Again the bishop moved back wearily into his chair. "You mean then,"
he said, "perhaps, that she is a married woman?" Latimer pressed his
lips together at first as though he would not answer, and then raised
his eyes coldly. "Perhaps," he said.

The older man had held up his hand as if to signify that what he was
about to say should be listened to without interruption, when a sharp
turning of the lock of the door caused both father and the suitor to
start. Then they turned and looked at each other with anxious inquiry
and with much concern, for they recognized for the first time that
their voices had been loud. The older man stepped quickly across the
floor, but before he reached the middle of the room the door opened
from the outside, and his daughter stood in the door-way, with her
head held down and her eyes looking at the floor.

"Ellen!" exclaimed the father, in a voice of pain and the deepest
pity.

The girl moved toward the place from where his voice came, without
raising her eyes, and when she reached him put her arms about him and
hid her face on his shoulder. She moved as though she were tired, as
though she were exhausted by some heavy work.

"My child," said the bishop, gently, "were you listening?" There was
no reproach in his voice; it was simply full of pity and concern.

"I thought," whispered the girl, brokenly, "that he would be
frightened; I wanted to hear what he would say. I thought I could
laugh at him for it afterward. I did it for a joke. I thought--" she
stopped with a little gasping sob that she tried to hide, and for a
moment held herself erect and then sank back again into her father's
arms with her head upon his breast.

Latimer started forward, holding out his arms to her. "Ellen," he
said, "surely, Ellen, you are not against me. You see how preposterous
it is, how unjust it is to me. You cannot mean--"

The girl raised her head and shrugged her shoulders slightly as though
she were cold. "Father," she said, wearily, "ask him to go away, Why
does he stay? Ask him to go away."

Latimer stopped and took a step back as though some one had struck
him, and then stood silent with his face flushed and his eyes
flashing. It was not in answer to anything that they said that he
spoke, but to their attitude and what it suggested. "You stand there,"
he began, "you two stand there as though I were something unclean, as
though I had committed some crime. You look at me as though I were on
trial for murder or worse. Both of you together against me. What have
I done? What difference is there? You loved me a half-hour ago, Ellen;
you said you did. I know you loved me; and you, sir," he added, more
quietly, "treated me like a friend. Has anything come since then to
change me or you? Be fair to me, be sensible. What is the use of this?
It is a silly, needless, horrible mistake. You know I love you, Ellen;
love you better than all the world. I don't have to tell you that; you
know it, you can see and feel it. It does not need to be said; words
can't make it any truer. You have confused yourselves and stultified
yourselves with this trick, this test by hypothetical conditions, by
considering what is not real or possible. It is simple enough; it is
plain enough. You know I love you, Ellen, and you only, and that is
all there is to it, and all that there is of any consequence in the
world to me. The matter stops there; that is all there is for you to
consider. Answer me, Ellen, speak to me. Tell me that you believe me."

He stopped and moved a step toward her, but as he did so, the girl,
still without looking up, drew herself nearer to her father and shrank
more closely into his arms; but the father's face was troubled and
doubtful, and he regarded the younger man with a look of the most
anxious scrutiny. Latimer did not regard this. Their hands were raised
against him as far as he could understand, and he broke forth again
proudly, and with a defiant indignation:

"What right have you to judge me?" he began; "what do you know of what
I have suffered, and endured, and overcome? How can you know what I
have had to give up and put away from me? It's easy enough for you to
draw your skirts around you, but what can a woman bred as you have
been bred know of what I've had to fight against and keep under and
cut away? It was an easy, beautiful idyl to you; your love came to you
only when it should have come, and for a man who was good and worthy,
and distinctly eligible--I don't mean that; forgive me, Ellen, but you
drive me beside myself. But he is good and he believes himself worthy,
and I say that myself before you both. But I am only worthy and only
good because of that other love that I put away when it became a
crime, when it became impossible. Do you know what it cost me? Do you
know what it meant to me, and what I went through, and how I suffered?
Do you know who this other woman is whom you are insulting with your
doubts and guesses in the dark? Can't you spare her? Am I not enough?
Perhaps it was easy for her, too; perhaps her silence cost her
nothing; perhaps she did not suffer and has nothing but happiness and
content to look forward to for the rest of her life; and I tell you
that it is because we did put it away, and kill it, and not give way
to it that I am whatever I am to-day; whatever good there is in me is
due to that temptation and to the fact that I beat it and overcame it
and kept myself honest and clean. And when I met you and learned to
know you I believed in my heart that God had sent you to me that I
might know what it was to love a woman whom I could marry and who
could be my wife; that you were the reward for my having overcome
temptation and the sign that I had done well. And now you throw me
over and put me aside as though I were something low and unworthy,
because of this temptation, because of this very thing that has made
me know myself and my own strength and that has kept me up for you."

As the young man had been speaking, the bishop's eyes had never left
his face, and as he finished, the face of the priest grew clearer and
decided, and calmly exultant. And as Latimer ceased he bent his head
above his daughter's, and said in a voice that seemed to speak with
more than human inspiration. "My child," he said, "if God had given me
a son I should have been proud if he could have spoken as this young
man has done."

But the woman only said, "Let him go to her."

"Ellen, oh, Ellen!" cried the father.

He drew back from the girl in his arms and looked anxiously and
feelingly at her lover. "How could you, Ellen," he said, "how could
you?" He was watching the young man's face with eyes full of sympathy
and concern. "How little you know him," he said, "how little you
understand. He will not do that," he added quickly, but looking
questioningly at Latimer and speaking in a tone almost of command. "He
will not undo all that he has done; I know him better than that." But
Latimer made no answer, and for a moment the two men stood watching
each other and questioning each other with their eyes. Then Latimer
turned, and without again so much as glancing at the girl walked
steadily to the door and left the room. He passed on slowly down the
stairs and out into the night, and paused upon the top of the steps
leading to the street. Below him lay the avenue with its double line
of lights stretching off in two long perspectives. The lamps of
hundreds of cabs and carriages flashed as they advanced toward him and
shone for a moment at the turnings of the cross-streets, and from
either side came the ceaseless rush and murmur, and over all hung the
strange mystery that covers a great city at night. Latimer's rooms lay
to the south, but he stood looking toward a spot to the north with a
reckless, harassed look in his face that had not been there for many
months. He stood so for a minute, and then gave a short shrug of
disgust at his momentary doubt and ran quickly down the steps. "No,"
he said, "if it were for a month, yes; but it is to be for many years,
many more long years." And turning his back resolutely to the north he
went slowly home.




THE TRAILER FOR ROOM NO. 8


The "trailer" for the green-goods men who rented room No. 8 in Case's
tenement had had no work to do for the last few days, and was cursing
his luck in consequence.

He was entirely too young to curse, but he had never been told so,
and, indeed, so imperfect had his training been that he had never been
told not to do anything as long as it pleased him to do it and made
existence any more bearable.

He had been told when he was very young, before the man and woman who
had brought him into the world had separated, not to crawl out on the
fire-escape, because he might break his neck, and later, after his
father had walked off Hegelman's Slip into the East River while very
drunk, and his mother had been sent to the penitentiary for grand
larceny, he had been told not to let the police catch him sleeping
under the bridge.

With these two exceptions he had been told to do as he pleased, which
was the very mockery of advice, as he was just about as well able to
do as he pleased as is any one who has to beg or steal what he eats
and has to sleep in hall-ways or over the iron gratings of warm
cellars and has the officers of the children's societies always after
him to put him in a "Home" and make him be "good."

"Snipes," as the trailer was called, was determined no one should ever
force him to be good if he could possibly prevent it. And he certainly
did do a great deal to prevent it. He knew what having to be good
meant. Some of the boys who had escaped from the Home had told him all
about that. It meant wearing shoes and a blue and white checkered
apron, and making cane-bottomed chairs all day, and having to wash
yourself in a big iron tub twice a week, not to speak of having to
move about like machines whenever the lady teacher hit a bell. So when
the green-goods men, of whom the genial Mr. Alf Wolfe was the chief,
asked Snipes to act as "trailer" for them at a quarter of a dollar for
every victim he shadowed, he jumped at the offer and was proud of the
position.

If you should happen to keep a grocery store in the country, or to run
the village post-office, it is not unlikely that you know what a
green-goods man is; but in case you don't, and have only a vague idea
as to how he lives, a paragraph of explanation must be inserted here
for your particular benefit. Green goods is the technical name for
counterfeit bills, and the green-goods men send out circulars to
countrymen all over the United States, offering to sell them $5,000
worth of counterfeit money for $500, and ease their conscience by
explaining to them that by purchasing these green goods they are
hurting no one but the Government, which is quite able, with its big
surplus, to stand the loss. They enclose a letter which is to serve
their victim as a mark of identification or credential when he comes
on to purchase.

The address they give him is in one of the many drug-store and cigar-
store post-offices which are scattered all over New York, and which
contribute to make vice and crime so easy that the evil they do cannot
be reckoned in souls lost or dollars stolen. If the letter from the
countryman strikes the dealers in green goods as sincere, they appoint
an interview with him by mail in rooms they rent for the purpose, and
if they, on meeting him there, think he is still in earnest and not a
detective or officer in disguise, they appoint still another
interview, to be held later in the day in the back room of some
saloon.

Then the countryman is watched throughout the day from the moment he
leaves the first meeting-place until he arrives at the saloon. If
anything in his conduct during that time leads the man whose duty it
is to follow him, or the "trailer," as the profession call it, to
believe he is a detective, he finds when he arrives at the saloon that
there is no one to receive him. But if the trailer regards his conduct
as unsuspicious, he is taken to another saloon, not the one just
appointed, which is, perhaps, a most respectable place, but to the
thieves' own private little rendezvous, where he is robbed in any of
the several different ways best suited to their purpose.

Snipes was a very good trailer. He was so little that no one ever
noticed him, and he could keep a man in sight no matter how big the
crowd was, or how rapidly it changed and shifted. And he was as
patient as he was quick, and would wait for hours if needful, with his
eye on a door, until his man reissued into the street again. And if
the one he shadowed looked behind him to see if he was followed, or
dodged up and down different streets, as if he were trying to throw
off pursuit, or despatched a note or telegram, or stopped to speak to
a policeman or any special officer, as a detective might, who thought
he had his men safely in hand, off Snipes would go on a run, to where
Alf Wolfe was waiting, and tell what he had seen.

Then Wolfe would give him a quarter or more, and the trailer would go
back to his post opposite Case's tenement, and wait for another victim
to issue forth, and for the signal from No. 8 to follow him. It was
not much fun, and "customers," as Mr. Wolfe always called them, had
been scarce, and Mr. Wolfe, in consequence, had been cross and nasty
in his temper, and had batted Snipe out of the way on more than one
occasion. So the trailer was feeling blue and disconsolate, and
wondered how it was that "Naseby" Raegen, "Rags" Raegen's younger
brother, had had the luck to get a two weeks' visit to the country
with the Fresh Air Fund children, while he had not.

He supposed it was because Naseby had sold papers, and wore shoes, and
went to night school, and did many other things equally objectionable.
Still, what Naseby had said about the country, and riding horseback,
and the fishing, and the shooting crows with no cops to stop you, and
watermelons for nothing, had sounded wonderfully attractive and quite
improbable, except that it was one of Naseby's peculiarly sneaking
ways to tell the truth. Anyway, Naseby had left Cherry Street for
good, and had gone back to the country to work there. This all helped
to make Snipes morose, and it was with a cynical smile of satisfaction
that he watched an old countryman coming slowly up the street, and
asking his way timidly of the Italians to Case's tenement.

The countryman looked up and about him in evident bewilderment and
anxiety. He glanced hesitatingly across at the boy leaning against the
wall of a saloon, but the boy was watching two sparrows fighting in
the dirt of the street, and did not see him. At least, it did not look
as if he saw him. Then the old man knocked on the door of Case's
tenement. No one came, for the people in the house had learned to
leave inquiring countrymen to the gentleman who rented room No. 8, and
as that gentleman was occupied at that moment with a younger
countryman, he allowed the old man, whom he had first cautiously
observed from the top of the stairs, to remain where he was.

The old man stood uncertainly on the stoop, and then removed his heavy
black felt hat and rubbed his bald head and the white shining locks of
hair around it with a red bandanna handkerchief. Then he walked very
slowly across the street toward Snipes, for the rest of the street was
empty, and there was no one else at hand. The old man was dressed in
heavy black broadcloth, quaintly cut, with boot legs showing up under
the trousers, and with faultlessly clean linen of home-made
manufacture.

"I can't make the people in that house over there hear me," complained
the old man, with the simple confidence that old age has in very young
boys. "Do you happen to know if they're at home?"

"Nop," growled Snipes.

"I'm looking for a man named Perceval," said the stranger; "he lives
in that house, and I wanter see him on most particular business. It
isn't a very pleasing place he lives in, is it--at least," he
hurriedly added, as if fearful of giving offence, "it isn't much on
the outside? Do you happen to know him?"

Perceval was Alf Wolfe's business name.

"Nop," said the trailer.

"Well, I'm not looking for him," explained the stranger, slowly, "as
much as I'm looking for a young man that I kind of suspect is been to
see him to-day: a young man that looks like me, only younger. Has
lightish hair and pretty tall and lanky, and carrying a shiny black
bag with him. Did you happen to hev noticed him going into that place
across the way?"

"Nop," said Snipes.

The old man sighed and nodded his head thoughtfully at Snipes, and
puckered up the corners of his mouth, as though he were thinking
deeply. He had wonderfully honest blue eyes, and with the white hair
hanging around his sun-burned face, he looked like an old saint. But
the trailer didn't know that: he did know, though, that this man was a
different sort from the rest. Still, that was none of his business.

"What is't you want to see him about?" he asked sullenly, while he
looked up and down the street and everywhere but at the old man, and
rubbed one bare foot slowly over the other.

The old man looked pained, and much to Snipe's surprise, the question
brought the tears to his eyes, and his lips trembled. Then he swerved
slightly, so that he might have fallen if Snipes had not caught him
and helped him across the pavement to a seat on a stoop. "Thankey,
son," said the stranger; "I'm not as strong as I was, an' the sun's
mighty hot, an' these streets of yours smell mighty bad, and I've had
a powerful lot of trouble these last few days. But if I could see this
man Perceval before my boy does, I know I could fix it, and it would
all come out right."

"What do you want to see him about?" repeated the trailer,
suspiciously, while he fanned the old man with his hat. Snipes could
not have told you why he did this or why this particular old
countryman was any different from the many others who came to buy
counterfeit money and who were thieves at heart as well as in deed.

"I want to see him about my son," said the old man to the little boy.
"He's a bad man whoever he is. This 'ere Perceval is a bad man. He
sends down his wickedness to the country and tempts weak folks to sin.
He teaches 'em ways of evil-doing they never heard of, and he's ruined
my son with the others--ruined him. I've had nothing to do with the
city and its ways; we're strict living, simple folks, and perhaps
we've been too strict, or Abraham wouldn't have run away to the city.
But I thought it was best, and I doubted nothing when the fresh-air
children came to the farm. I didn't like city children, but I let 'em
come. I took 'em in, and did what I could to make it pleasant for 'em.
Poor little fellers, all as thin as corn-stalks and pale as ghosts,
and as dirty as you.

"I took 'em in and let 'em ride the horses, and swim in the river, and
shoot crows in the cornfield, and eat all the cherries they could
pull, and what did the city send me in return for that? It sent me
this thieving, rascally scheme of this man Perceval's, and it turned
my boy's head, and lost him to me. I saw him poring over the note and
reading it as if it were Gospel, and I suspected nothing. And when he
asked me if he could keep it, I said yes he could, for I thought he
wanted it for a curiosity, and then off he put with the black bag and
the $200 he's been saving up to start housekeeping with when the old
Deacon says he can marry his daughter Kate." The old man placed both
hands on his knees and went on excitedly.

"The old Deacon says he'll not let 'em marry till Abe has $2,000, and
that is what the boy's come after. He wants to buy $2,000 worth of bad
money with his $200 worth of good money, to show the Deacon, just as
though it were likely a marriage after such a crime as that would ever
be a happy one."

Snipes had stopped fanning the old man, as he ran on, and was
listening intently, with an uncomfortable feeling of sympathy and
sorrow, uncomfortable because he was not used to it.

He could not see why the old man should think the city should have
treated his boy better because he had taken care of the city's
children, and he was puzzled between his allegiance to the gang and
his desire to help the gang's innocent victim, and then because he was
an innocent victim and not a "customer," he let his sympathy get the
better of his discretion.

"Saay," he began, abruptly, "I'm not sayin' nothin' to nobody, and
nobody's sayin' nothin' to me--see? but I guess your son'll be around
here to-day, sure. He's got to come before one, for this office closes
sharp at one, and we goes home. Now, I've got the call whether he gets
his stuff taken off him or whether the boys leave him alone. If I say
the word, they'd no more come near him than if he had the cholera--
see? An' I'll say it for this oncet, just for you. Hold on," he
commanded, as the old man raised his voice in surprised interrogation,
"don't ask no questions, 'cause you won't get no answers 'except lies.
You find your way back to the Grand Central Depot and wait there, and
I'll steer your son down to you, sure, as soon as I can find him--see?
Now get along, or you'll get me inter trouble."

"You've been lying to me, then," cried the old man, "and you're as bad
as any of them, and my boy's over in that house now."

He scrambled up from the stoop, and before the trailer could
understand what he proposed to do, had dashed across the street and up
the stoop, and up the stairs, and had burst into room No. 8.

Snipes tore after him. "Come back! come back out of that, you old
fool!" he cried. "You'll get killed in there!" Snipes was afraid to
enter room No. 8, but he could hear from the outside the old man
challenging Alf Wolfe in a resonant angry voice that rang through the
building.

"Whew!" said Snipes, crouching on the stairs, "there's goin' to be a
muss this time, sure!"

"Where's my son? Where have you hidden my son?" demanded, the old man.
He ran across the room and pulled open a door that led into another
room, but it was empty. He had fully expected to see his boy murdered
and quartered, and with his pockets inside out. He turned on Wolfe,
shaking his white hair like a mane. "Give me up my son, you rascal
you!" he cried, "or I'll get the police, and I'll tell them how you
decoy honest boys to your den and murder them."

"Are you drunk or crazy, or just a little of both?" asked Mr. Wolfe.
"For a cent I'd throw you out of that window. Get out of here! Quick,
now! You're too old to get excited like that; it's not good for you."

But this only exasperated the old man the more, and he made a lunge at
the confidence man's throat. Mr. Wolfe stepped aside and caught him
around the waist and twisted his leg around the old man's rheumatic
one, and held him. "Now," said Wolfe, as quietly as though he were
giving a lesson in wrestling, "if I wanted to, I could break your
back."

The old man glared up at him, panting. "Your son's not here," said
Wolfe, "and this is a private gentleman's private room. I could turn
you over to the police for assault if I wanted to; but," he added,
magnanimously, "I won't. Now get out of here and go home to your wife,
and when you come to see the sights again don't drink so much raw
whiskey." He half carried the old farmer to the top of the stairs and
dropped him, and went back and closed the door. Snipes came up and
helped him down and out, and the old man and the boy walked slowly and
in silence out to the Bowery. Snipes helped his companion into a car
and put him off at the Grand Central Depot. The heat and the
excitement had told heavily on the old man, and he seemed dazed and
beaten.

He was leaning on the trailer's shoulder and waiting for his turn in
the line in front of the ticket window, when a tall, gawky, good-
looking country lad sprang out of it and at him with an expression of
surprise and anxiety. "Father," he said, "father, what's wrong? What
are you doing here? Is anybody ill at home? Are _you_ ill?"

"Abraham," said the old man, simply, and dropped heavily on the
younger man's shoulder. Then he raised his head sternly and said: "I
thought you were murdered, but better that than a thief, Abraham. What
brought you here? What did you do with that rascal's letter? What did
you do with his money?"

The trailer drew cautiously away; the conversation was becoming
unpleasantly personal.

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Abraham, calmly. "The
Deacon gave his consent the other night without the $2,000, and I took
the $200 I'd saved and came right on in the fust train to buy the
ring. It's pretty, isn't it?" he said, flushing, as he pulled out a
little velvet box and opened it.

The old man was so happy at this that he laughed and cried
alternately, and then he made a grab for the trailer and pulled him
down beside him on one of the benches.

"You've got to come with me," he said, with kind severity. "You're a
good boy, but your folks have let you run wrong. You've been good to
me, and you said you would get me back my boy and save him from those
thieves, and I believe now that you meant it. Now you're just coming
back with us to the farm and the cows and the river, and you can eat
all you want and live with us, and never, never see this unclean,
wicked city again."

Snipes looked up keenly from under the rim of his hat and rubbed one
of his muddy feet over the other as was his habit. The young
countryman, greatly puzzled, and the older man smiling kindly, waited
expectantly in silence. From outside came the sound of the car-bells
jangling, and the rattle of cabs, and the cries of drivers, and all
the varying rush and turmoil of a great metropolis. Green fields, and
running rivers, and fruit that did not grow in wooden boxes or brown
paper cones, were myths and idle words to Snipes, but this "unclean,
wicked city" he knew.

"I guess you're too good for me," he said, with an uneasy laugh. "I
guess little old New York's good enough for me."

"What!" cried the old man, in the tones of greatest concern. "You
would go back to that den of iniquity, surely not,--to that thief
Perceval?"

"Well," said the trailer, slowly, "and he's not such a bad lot,
neither. You see he could hev broke your neck that time when you was
choking him, but he didn't. There's your train," he added hurriedly
and jumping away. "Good-by. So long, old man. I'm much 'bliged to you
jus' for asking me."

Two hours later the farmer and his son were making the family weep and
laugh over their adventures, as they all sat together on the porch
with the vines about it; and the trailer was leaning against the wall
of a saloon and apparently counting his ten toes, but in reality
watching for Mr. Wolfe to give the signal from the window of room No. 8.




"THERE WERE NINETY AND NINE"


Young Harringford, or the "Goodwood Plunger," as he was perhaps better
known at that time, had come to Monte Carlo in a very different spirit
and in a very different state of mind from any in which he had ever
visited the place before. He had come there for the same reason that a
wounded lion, or a poisoned rat, for that matter, crawls away into a
corner, that it may be alone when it dies. He stood leaning against
one of the pillars of the Casino with his back to the moonlight, and
with his eyes blinking painfully at the flaming lamps above the green
tables inside. He knew they would be put out very soon; and as he had
something to do then, he regarded them fixedly with painful
earnestness, as a man who is condemned to die at sunrise watches
through his barred windows for the first gray light of the morning.

That queer, numb feeling in his head and the sharp line of pain
between his eyebrows which had been growing worse for the last three
weeks, was troubling him more terribly than ever before, and his
nerves had thrown off all control and rioted at the base of his head
and at his wrists, and jerked and twitched as though, so it seemed to
him, they were striving to pull the tired body into pieces and to set
themselves free. He was wondering whether if he should take his hand
from his pocket and touch his head he would find that it had grown
longer, and had turned into a soft, spongy mass which would give
beneath his fingers. He considered this for some time, and even went
so far as to half withdraw one hand, but thought better of it and
shoved it back again as he considered how much less terrible it was to
remain in doubt than to find that this phenomenon had actually taken
place.

The pity of the whole situation was, that the boy was only a boy with
all his man's miserable knowledge of the world, and the reason of it
all was, that he had entirely too much heart and not enough money to
make an unsuccessful gambler. If he had only been able to lose his
conscience instead of his money, or even if he had kept his conscience
and won, it is not likely that he would have been waiting for the
lights to go out at Monte Carlo. But he had not only lost all of his
money and more besides, which he could never make up, but he had lost
other things which meant much more to him now than money, and which
could not be made up or paid back at even usurious interest. He had
not only lost the right to sit at his father's table, but the right to
think of the girl whose place in Surrey ran next to that of his own
people, and whose lighted window in the north wing he had watched on
those many dreary nights when she had been ill, from his own terrace
across the trees in the park. And all he had gained was the notoriety
that made him a by-word with decent people, and the hero of the race-
tracks and the music-halls. He was no longer "Young Harringford, the
eldest son of the Harringfords of Surrey," but the "Goodwood Plunger,"
to whom Fortune had made desperate love and had then jilted, and
mocked, and overthrown.

As he looked back at it now and remembered himself as he was then, it
seemed as though he was considering an entirely distinct and separate
personage--a boy of whom he liked to think, who had had strong,
healthy ambitions and gentle tastes. He reviewed it passionlessly as
he stood staring at the lights inside the Casino, as clearly as he was
capable of doing in his present state and with miserable interest. How
he had laughed when young Norton told him in boyish confidence that
there was a horse named Siren in his father's stables which would win
the Goodwood Cup; how, having gone down to see Norton's people when
the long vacation began, he had seen Siren daily, and had talked of
her until two every morning in the smoking-room, and had then staid up
two hours later to watch her take her trial spin over the downs. He
remembered how they used to stamp back over the long grass wet with
dew, comparing watches and talking of the time in whispers, and said
good night as the sun broke over the trees in the park. And then just
at this time of all others, when the horse was the only interest of
those around him, from Lord Norton and his whole household down to the
youngest stable-boy and oldest gaffer in the village, he had come into
his money.

And then began the then and still inexplicable plunge into gambling,
and the wagering of greater sums than the owner of Siren dared to risk
himself, the secret backing of the horse through commissioners all
over England, until the boy by his single fortune had brought the odds
against her from 60 to 0 down to 6 to 0. He recalled, with a thrill
that seemed to settle his nerves for the moment, the little black
specks at the starting-post and the larger specks as the horses turned
the first corner. The rest of the people on the coach were making a
great deal of noise, he remembered, but he, who had more to lose than
any one or all of them together, had stood quite still with his feet
on the wheel and his back against the box-seat, and with his hands
sunk into his pockets and the nails cutting through his gloves. The
specks grew into horses with bits of color on them, and then the deep
muttering roar of the crowd merged into one great shout, and swelled
and grew into sharper, quicker, impatient cries, as the horses turned
into the stretch with only their heads showing toward the goal. Some
of the people were shouting "Firefly!" and others were calling on
"Vixen!" and others, who had their glasses up, cried "Trouble leads!"
but he only waited until he could distinguish the Norton colors, with
his lips pressed tightly together. Then they came so close that their
hoofs echoed as loudly as when horses gallop over a bridge, and from
among the leaders Siren's beautiful head and shoulders showed like
sealskin in the sun, and the boy on her back leaned forward and
touched her gently with his hand, as they had so often seen him do on
the downs, and Siren, as though he had touched a spring, leaped
forward with her head shooting back and out, like a piston-rod that
has broken loose from its fastening and beats the air, while the
jockey sat motionless, with his right arm hanging at his side as
limply as though it were broken, and with his left moving forward and
back in time with the desperate strokes of the horse's head.

"Siren wins!" cried Lord Norton, with a grim smile, and "Siren!" the
mob shouted back with wonder and angry disappointment, and "Siren!"
the hills echoed from far across the course. Young Harringford felt as
if he had suddenly been lifted into heaven after three months of
purgatory, and smiled uncertainly at the excited people on the coach
about him. It made him smile even now when he recalled young Norton's
flushed face and the awe and reproach in his voice when he climbed up
and whispered, "Why, Cecil, they say in the ring you've won a fortune,
and you never told us." And how Griffith, the biggest of the book-
makers, with the rest of them at his back, came up to him and touched
his hat resentfully, and said, "You'll have to give us time, sir; I'm
very hard hit"; and how the crowd stood about him and looked at him
curiously, and the Certain Royal Personage turned and said, "Who--not
that boy, surely?" Then how, on the day following, the papers told of
the young gentleman who of all others had won a fortune, thousands and
thousands of pounds they said, getting back sixty for every one he had
ventured; and pictured him in baby clothes with the cup in his arms,
or in an Eton jacket; and how all of them spoke of him slightingly, or
admiringly, as the "Goodwood Plunger."

He did not care to go on after that; to recall the mortification of
his father, whose pride was hurt and whose hopes were dashed by this
sudden, mad freak of fortune, nor how he railed at it and provoked him
until the boy rebelled and went back to the courses, where he was a
celebrity and a king.

The rest is a very common story. Fortune and greater fortune at first;
days in which he could not lose, days in which he drove back to the
crowded inns choked with dust, sunburnt and fagged with excitement, to
a riotous supper and baccarat, and afterward went to sleep only to see
cards and horses and moving crowds and clouds of dust; days spent in a
short covert coat, with a field-glass over his shoulder and with a
pasteboard ticket dangling from his buttonhole; and then came the
change that brought conscience up again, and the visits to the Jews,
and the slights of the men who had never been his friends, but whom he
had thought had at least liked him for himself, even if he did not
like them; and then debts, and more debts, and the borrowing of money
to pay here and there, and threats of executions; and, with it all,
the longing for the fields and trout springs of Surrey and the walk
across the park to where she lived.

This grew so strong that he wrote to his father, and was told briefly
that he who was to have kept up the family name had dragged it into
the dust of the race-courses, and had changed it at his own wish to
that of the Boy Plunger--and that the breach was irreconcilable.

Then this queer feeling came on, and he wondered why he could not eat,
and why he shivered even when the room was warm or the sun shining,
and the fear came upon him that with all this trouble and disgrace his
head might give way, and then that it had given way. This came to him
at all times, and lately more frequently and with a fresher, more
cruel thrill of terror, and he began to watch himself and note how he
spoke, and to repeat over what he had said to see if it were sensible,
and to question himself as to why he laughed, and at what. It was not
a question of whether it would or would not be cowardly; It was simply
a necessity. The thing had to be stopped. He had to have rest and
sleep and peace again. He had boasted in those reckless, prosperous
days that if by any possible chance he should lose his money he would
drive a hansom, or emigrate to the colonies, or take the shilling. He
had no patience in those days with men who could not live on in
adversity, and who were found in the gun-room with a hole in their
heads, and whose family asked their polite friends to believe that a
man used to firearms from his school-days had tried to load a hair-
trigger revolver with the muzzle pointed at his forehead. He had
expressed a fine contempt for those men then, but now he had forgotten
all that, and thought only of the relief it would bring, and not how
others might suffer by it. If he did consider this, it was only to
conclude that they would quite understand, and be glad that his pain
and fear were over.

Then he planned a grand _coup_ which was to pay off all his debts and
give him a second chance to present himself a supplicant at his
father's house. If it failed, he would have to stop this queer feeling
in his head at once. The Grand Prix and the English horse was the
final _coup_. On this depended everything--the return of his fortunes,
the reconciliation with his father, and the possibility of meeting her
again. It was a very hot day he remembered, and very bright; but the
tall poplars on the road to the races seemed to stop growing just at a
level with his eyes. Below that it was clear enough, but all above
seemed black--as though a cloud had fallen and was hanging just over
the people's heads. He thought of speaking of this to his man Walters,
who had followed his fortunes from the first, but decided not to do
so, for, as it was, he had noticed that Walters had observed him
closely of late, and had seemed to spy upon him. The race began, and
he looked through his glass for the English horse in the front and
could not find her, and the Frenchman beside him cried, "Frou Frou!"
as Frou Frou passed the goal. He lowered his glasses slowly and
unscrewed them very carefully before dropping them back into the case;
then he buckled the strap, and turned and looked about him. Two
Frenchmen who had won a hundred francs between them were jumping and
dancing at his side. He remembered wondering why they did not speak in
English. Then the sunlight changed to a yellow, nasty glare, as though
a calcium light had been turned on the glass and colors, and he pushed
his way back to his carriage, leaning heavily on the servant's arm,
and drove slowly back to Paris, with the driver flecking his horses
fretfully with his whip, for he had wished to wait and see the end of
the races.

He had selected Monte Carlo as the place for it, because it was more
unlike his home than any other spot, and because one summer night,
when he had crossed the lawn from the Casino to the hotel with a gay
party of young men and women, they had come across something under a
bush which they took to be a dog or a man asleep, and one of the men
had stepped forward and touched it with his foot, and had then turned
sharply and said, "Take those girls away"; and while some hurried the
women back, frightened and curious, he and the others had picked up
the body and found it to be that of a young Russian whom they had just
seen losing, with a very bad grace, at the tables. There was no
passion in his face now, and his evening dress was quite unruffled,
and only a black spot on the shirt front showed where the powder had
burnt the linen. It had made a great impression on him then, for he
was at the height of his fortunes, with crowds of sycophantic friends
and a retinue of dependents at his heels. And now that he was quite
alone and disinherited by even these sorry companions there seemed no
other escape from the pain in his brain but to end it, and he sought
this place of all others as the most fitting place in which to die.

So, after Walters had given the proper papers and checks to the
commissioner who handled his debts for him, he left Paris and took the
first train for Monte Carlo, sitting at the window of the carriage,
and beating a nervous tattoo on the pane with his ring until the old
gentleman at the other end of the compartment scowled at him. But
Harringford did not see him, nor the trees and fields as they swept
by, and it was not until Walters came and said, "You get out here,
sir," that he recognized the yellow station and the great hotels on
the hill above. It was half-past eleven, and the lights in the Casino
were still burning brightly. He wondered whether he would have time to
go over to the hotel and write a letter to his father and to her. He
decided, after some difficult consideration, that he would not. There
was nothing to say that they did not know already, or that they would
fail to understand. But this suggested to him that what they had
written to him must be destroyed at once, before any stranger could
claim the right to read it. He took his letters from his pocket and
looked them over carefully. They were most unpleasant reading. They
all seemed to be about money; some begged to remind him of this or
that debt, of which he had thought continuously for the last month,
while others were abusive and insolent. Each of them gave him actual
pain. One was the last letter he had received from his father just
before leaving Paris, and though he knew it by heart, he read it over
again for the last time. That it came too late, that it asked what he
knew now to be impossible, made it none the less grateful to him, but
that it offered peace and a welcome home made it all the more
terrible.

"I came to take this step through young Hargraves, the new curate,"
his father wrote, "though he was but the instrument in the hands of
Providence. He showed me the error of my conduct toward you, and
proved to me that my duty and the inclination of my heart were toward
the same end. He read this morning for the second lesson the story of
the Prodigal Son, and I heard it without recognition and with no
present application until he came to the verse which tells how the
father came to his son 'when he was yet a great way off.' He saw him,
it says, 'when he was yet a great way off,' and ran to meet him. He
did not wait for the boy to knock at his gate and beg to be let in,
but went out to meet him, and took him in his arms and led him back to
his home. Now, my boy, my son, it seems to me as if you had never been
so far off from me as you are at this present time, as if you had
never been so greatly separated from me in every thought and interest;
we are even worse than strangers, for you think that my hand is
against you, that I have closed the door of your home to you and
driven you away. But what I have done I beg of you to forgive: to
forget what I may have said in the past, and only to think of what I
say now. Your brothers are good boys and have been good sons to me,
and God knows I am thankful for such sons, and thankful to them for
bearing themselves as they have done.

"But, my boy, my first-born, my little Cecil, they can never be to me
what you have been. I can never feel for them as I feel for you; they
are the ninety and nine who have never wandered away upon the
mountains, and who have never been tempted, and have never left their
home for either good or evil. But you, Cecil, though you have made my
heart ache until I thought and even hoped it would stop beating, and
though you have given me many, many nights that I could not sleep, are
still dearer to me than anything else in the world. You are the flesh
of my flesh and the bone of my bone, and I cannot bear living on
without you. I cannot be at rest here, or look forward contentedly to
a rest hereafter, unless you are by me and hear me, unless I can see
your face and touch you and hear your laugh in the halls. Come back to
me, Cecil; to Harringford and the people that know you best, and know
what is best in you and love you for it. I can have only a few more
years here now when you will take my place and keep up my name. I will
not be here to trouble you much longer; but, my boy, while I am here,
come to me and make me happy for the rest of my life. There are others
who need you, Cecil. You know whom I mean. I saw her only yesterday,
and she asked me of you with such splendid disregard for what the
others standing by might think, and as though she dared me or them to
say or even imagine anything against you. You cannot keep away from us
both much longer. Surely not; you will come back and make us happy for
the rest of our lives."

The Goodwood Plunger turned his back to the lights so that the people
passing could not see his face, and tore the letter up slowly and
dropped it piece by piece over the balcony. "If I could," he
whispered; "if I could." The pain was a little worse than usual just
then, but it was no longer a question of inclination. He felt only
this desire to stop these thoughts and doubts and the physical tremor
that shook him. To rest and sleep, that was what he must have, and
peace. There was no peace at home or anywhere else while this thing
lasted. He could not see why they worried him in this way. It was
quite impossible. He felt much more sorry for them than for himself,
but only because they could not understand. He was quite sure that if
they could feel what he suffered they would help him, even to end it.

He had been standing for some time with his back to the light, but now
he turned to face it and to take up his watch again. He felt quite
sure the lights would not burn much longer. As he turned, a woman came
forward from out the lighted hall, hovered uncertainly before him, and
then made a silent salutation, which was something between a courtesy
and a bow. That she was a woman and rather short and plainly dressed,
and that her bobbing up and down annoyed him, was all that he realized
of her presence, and he quite failed to connect her movements with
himself in any way. "Sir," she said in French, "I beg your pardon, but
might I speak with you?" The Goodwood Plunger possessed a somewhat
various knowledge of Monte Carlo and its _habitues_. It was not the
first time that women who had lost at the tables had begged a napoleon
from him, or asked the distinguished child of fortune what color or
combination she should play. That, in his luckier days, had happened
often and had amused him, but now he moved back irritably and wished
that the figure in front of him would disappear as it had come.

"I am in great trouble, sir," the woman said. "I have no friends here,
sir, to whom I may apply. I am very bold, but my anxiety is very
great."

The Goodwood Plunger raised his hat slightly and bowed. Then he
concentrated his eyes with what was a distinct effort on the queer
little figure hovering in front of him, and stared very hard. She wore
an odd piece of red coral for a brooch, and by looking steadily at
this he brought the rest of the figure into focus and saw, without
surprise,--for every commonplace seemed strange to him now, and
everything peculiar quite a matter of course,--that she was distinctly
not an _habituee_ of the place, and looked more like a lady's maid
than an adventuress. She was French and pretty,--such a girl as might
wait in a Duval restaurant or sit as a cashier behind a little counter
near the door.

"We should not be here," she said, as if in answer to his look and in
apology for her presence. "But Louis, my husband, he would come. I
told him that this was not for such as we are, but Louis is so bold.
He said that upon his marriage tour he would live with the best, and
so here he must come to play as the others do. We have been married,
sir, only since Tuesday, and we must go back to Paris to-morrow; they
would give him only the three days. He is not a gambler; he plays
dominos at the cafes, it is true. But what will you? He is young and
with so much spirit, and I know that you, sir, who are so fortunate
and who understand so well how to control these tables, I know that
you will persuade him. He will not listen to me; he is so greatly
excited and so little like himself. You will help me, sir, will you
not? You will speak to him?"

The Goodwood Plunger knit his eyebrows and closed the lids once or
twice, and forced the mistiness and pain out of his eyes. It was most
annoying. The woman seemed to be talking a great deal and to say very
much, but he could not make sense of it. He moved his shoulders
slightly. "I can't understand," he said wearily, turning away.

"It is my husband," the woman said anxiously: "Louis, he is playing at
the table inside, and he is only an apprentice to old Carbut the
baker, but he owns a third of the store. It was my _dot_ that paid for
it," she added proudly. "Old Carbut says he may have it all for 20,000
francs, and then old Carbut will retire, and we will be proprietors.
We have saved a little, and we had counted to buy the rest in five or
six years if we were very careful."

"I see, I see," said the Plunger, with a little short laugh of relief;
"I understand." He was greatly comforted to think that it was not so
bad as it had threatened. He saw her distinctly now and followed what
she said quite easily, and even such a small matter as talking with
this woman seemed to help him.

"He is gambling," he said, "and losing the money, and you come to me
to advise him what to play. I understand. Well, tell him he will lose
what little he has left; tell him I advise him to go home; tell him--"

"No, no!" the girl said excitedly; "you do not understand; he has not
lost, he has won. He has won, oh, so many rolls of money, but he will
not stop. Do you not see? He has won as much as we could earn in many
months--in many years, sir, by saving and working, oh, so very hard!
And now he risks it again, and I cannot force him away. But if you,
sir, if you would tell him how great the chances are against him, if
you who know would tell him how foolish he is not to be content with
what he has, he would listen. He says to me, 'Bah! you are a woman';
and he is so red and fierce; he is imbecile with the sight of the
money, but he will listen to a grand gentleman like you. He thinks to
win more and more, and he thinks to buy another third from old Carbut.
Is it not foolish? It is so wicked of him."

"Oh, yes," said the Goodwood Plunger, nodding, "I see now. You want me
to take him away so that he can keep what he has. I see; but I don't
know him. He will not listen to me, you know; I have no right to
interfere."

He turned away, rubbing his hand across his forehead. He wished so
much that this woman would leave him by himself.

"Ah, but, sir," cried the girl, desperately, and touching his coat,
"you who are so fortunate, and so rich, and of the great world, you
cannot feel what this is to me. To have my own little shop and to be
free, and not to slave, and sew, and sew until my back and fingers
burn with the pain. Speak to him, sir; ah, speak to him! It is so easy
a thing to do, and he will listen to you."

The Goodwood Plunger turned again abruptly. "Where is he?" he said.
"Point him out to me."

The woman ran ahead, with a murmur of gratitude, to the open door and
pointed to where her husband was standing leaning over and placing
some money on one of the tables. He was a handsome young Frenchman, as
_bourgeois_ as his wife, and now terribly alive and excited. In the
self-contained air of the place and in contrast with the silence of
the great hall he seemed even more conspicuously out of place. The
Plunger touched him on the arm, and the Frenchman shoved the hand off
impatiently and without looking around. The Plunger touched him again
and forced him to turn toward him.

"Well!" said the Frenchman, quickly. "Well?"

"Madame, your wife," said Cecil, with the grave politeness of an old
man, "has done me the honor to take me into her confidence. She tells
me that you have won a great deal of money; that you could put it to
good use at home, and so save yourselves much drudgery and debt, and
all that sort of trouble. You are quite right if you say it is no
concern of mine. It is not. But really, you know there is a great deal
of sense in what she wants, and you have apparently already won a
large sum."

The Frenchman was visibly surprised at this approach. He paused for a
second or two in some doubt, and even awe, for the disinherited one
carried the mark of a personage of consideration and of one whose
position is secure. Then he gave a short, unmirthful laugh.

"You are most kind, sir," he said with mock politeness and with an
impatient shrug. "But madame, my wife, has not done well to interest a
stranger in this affair, which, as you say, concerns you not."

He turned to the table again with a defiant swagger of independence
and placed two rolls of money upon the cloth, casting at the same
moment a childish look of displeasure at his wife. "You see," said the
Plunger, with a deprecatory turning out of his hands. But there was so
much grief on the girl's face that he turned again to the gambler and
touched his arm. He could not tell why he was so interested in these
two. He had witnessed many such scenes before, and they had not
affected him in any way except to make him move out of hearing. But
the same dumb numbness in his head, which made so many things seem
possible that should have been terrible even to think upon, made him
stubborn and unreasonable over this. He felt intuitively--it could not
be said that he thought--that the woman was right and the man wrong,
and so he grasped him again by the arm, and said sharply this time:

"Come away! Do you hear? You are acting foolishly."

But even as he spoke the red won, and the Frenchman with a boyish
gurgle of pleasure raked in his winnings with his two hands, and then
turned with a happy, triumphant laugh to his wife. It is not easy to
convince a man that he is making a fool of himself when he is winning
some hundred francs every two minutes. His silent arguments to the
contrary are difficult to answer. But the Plunger did not regard this
in the least.

"Do you hear me?" he said in the same stubborn tone and with much the
same manner with which he would have spoken to a groom. "Come away."

Again the Frenchman tossed off his hand, this time with an execration,
and again he placed the rolls of gold coin on the red; and again the
red won.

"My God!" cried the girl, running her fingers over the rolls on the
table, "he has won half of the 20,000 francs. Oh, sir, stop him, stop
him!" she cried. "Take him away."

"Do you hear me!" cried the Plunger, excited to a degree of utter
self-forgetfulness, and carried beyond himself; "you've got to come
with me."

"Take away your hand," whispered the young Frenchman, fiercely. "See,
I shall win it all; in one grand _coup_ I shall win it all. I shall
win five years' pay in one moment."

He swept all of the money forward on the red and threw himself over
the table to see the wheel.

"Wait, confound you!" whispered the Plunger, excitedly. "If you will
risk it, risk it with some reason. You can't play all that money; they
won't take it. Six thousand francs is the limit, unless," he ran on
quickly, "you divide the 12,000 francs among the three of us. You
understand, 6,000 francs is all that any one person can play; but if
you give 4,000 to me, and 4,000 to your wife, and keep 4,000 yourself,
we can each chance it. You can back the red if you like, your wife
shall put her money on the numbers coming up below eighteen, and I
will back the odd. In that way you stand to win 24,000 francs if our
combination wins, and you lose less than if you simply back the color.
Do you understand?"

"No!" cried the Frenchman, reaching for the piles of money which the
Plunger had divided rapidly into three parts, "on the red; all on the
red!"

"Good heavens, man!" cried the Plunger, bitterly. "I may not know
much, but you should allow me to understand this dirty business." He
caught the Frenchman by the wrists, and the young man, more impressed
with the strange look in the boy's face than by his physical force,
stood still, while the ball rolled and rolled, and clicked merrily,
and stopped, and balanced, and then settled into the "seven."

"Red, odd, and below," the croupier droned mechanically.

"Ah! you see; what did I tell you?" said the Plunger, with sudden
calmness. "You have won more than your 20,000 francs; you are
proprietors--I congratulate you!"

"Ah, my God!" cried the Frenchman, in a frenzy of delight, "I will
double it."

He reached toward the fresh piles of coin as if he meant to sweep them
back again, but the Plunger put himself in his way and with a quick
movement caught up the rolls of money and dropped them into the skirt
of the woman, which she raised like an apron to receive her treasure.

"Now," said young Harringford, determinedly, "you come with me." The
Frenchman tried to argue and resist, but the Plunger pushed him on
with the silent stubbornness of a drunken man. He handed the woman
into a carriage at the door, shoved her husband in beside her, and
while the man drove to the address she gave him, he told the
Frenchman, with an air of a chief of police, that he must leave Monte
Carlo at once, that very night.

"Do you suppose I don't know?" he said. "Do you fancy I speak without
knowledge? I've seen them come here rich and go away paupers. But you
shall not; you shall keep what you have and spite them." He sent the
woman up to her room to pack while he expostulated with and browbeat
the excited bridegroom in the carriage. When she returned with the bag
packed, and so heavy with the gold that the servants could hardly lift
it up beside the driver, he ordered the coachman to go down the hill
to the station.

"The train for Paris leaves at midnight," he said, "and you will be
there by morning. Then you must close your bargain with this old
Carbut, and never return here again."

The Frenchman had turned during the ride from an angry, indignant
prisoner to a joyful madman, and was now tearfully and effusively
humble in his petitions for pardon and in his thanks. Their
benefactor, as they were pleased to call him, hurried them into the
waiting train and ran to purchase their tickets for them.

"Now," he said, as the guard locked the door of the compartment, "you
are alone, and no one can get in, and you cannot get out. Go back to
your home, to your new home, and never come to this wretched place
again. Promise me--you understand?--never again!"

They promised with effusive reiteration. They embraced each other like
children, and the man, pulling off his hat, called upon the good Lord
to thank the gentleman.

"You will be in Paris, will you not?" said the woman, in an ecstasy of
pleasure, "and you will come to see us in our own shop, will you not?
Ah! we should be so greatly honored, sir, if you would visit us; if
you would come to the home you have given us. You have helped us so
greatly, sir," she said; "and may Heaven bless you!"

She caught up his gloved hand as it rested on the door and kissed it
until he snatched it away in great embarrassment and flushing like a
girl. Her husband drew her toward him, and the young bride sat at his
side with her face close to his and wept tears of pleasure and of
excitement.

"Ah, look, sir!" said the young man, joyfully; "look how happy you
have made us. You have made us happy for the rest of our lives."

The train moved out with a quick, heavy rush, and the car-wheels took
up the young stranger's last words and seemed to say, "You have made
us happy--made us happy for the rest of our lives."

It had all come about so rapidly that the Plunger had had no time to
consider or to weigh his motives, and all that seemed real to him now,
as he stood alone on the platform of the dark, deserted station, were
the words of the man echoing and re-echoing like the refrain of the
song. And then there came to him suddenly, and with all the force of a
gambler's superstition, the thought that the words were the same as
those which his father had used in his letter, "you can make us happy
for the rest of our lives."

"Ah," he said, with a quick gasp of doubt, "if I could! If I made
those poor fools happy, mayn't I live to be something to him, and to
her? O God!" he cried, but so gently that one at his elbow could not
have heard him, "if I could, if I could!"

He tossed up his hands, and drew them down again and clenched them in
front of him, and raised his tired, hot eyes to the calm purple sky
with its millions of moving stars. "Help me!" he whispered fiercely,
"help me." And as he lowered his head the queer numb feeling seemed to
go, and a calm came over his nerves and left him in peace. He did not
know what it might be, nor did he dare to question the change which
had come to him, but turned and slowly mounted the hill, with the awe
and fear still upon him of one who had passed beyond himself for one
brief moment into another world. When he reached his room he found his
servant bending with an anxious face over a letter which he tore up
guiltily as his master entered. "You were writing to my father," said
Cecil, gently, "were you not? Well, you need not finish your letter;
we are going home.

"I am going away from this place, Walters," he said as he pulled off
his coat and threw himself heavily on the bed. "I will take the first
train that leaves here, and I will sleep a little while you put up my
things. The first train, you understand--within an hour, if it leaves
that soon." His head sank back on the pillows heavily, as though he
had come in from a long, weary walk, and his eyes closed and his arms
fell easily at his side. The servant stood frightened and yet happy,
with the tears running down his cheeks, for he loved his master
dearly.

"We are going home, Walters," the Plunger whispered drowsily. "We are
going home; home to England and Harringford and the governor--and we
are going to be happy for all the rest of our lives." He paused a
moment, and Walters bent forward over the bed and held his breath to
listen.

"For he came to me," murmured the boy, as though he was speaking in
his sleep, "when I was yet a great way off--while I was yet a great
way off, and ran to meet me--"

His voice sank until it died away into silence, and a few hours later,
when Walters came to wake him, he found his master sleeping like a
child and smiling in his sleep.




THE CYNICAL MISS CATHERWAIGHT


Miss Catherwaight's collection of orders and decorations and medals
was her chief offence in the eyes of those of her dear friends who
thought her clever but cynical.

All of them were willing to admit that she was clever, but some of
them said she was clever only to be unkind.

Young Van Bibber had said that if Miss Catherwaight did not like
dances and days and teas, she had only to stop going to them instead
of making unpleasant remarks about those who did. So many people
repeated this that young Van Bibber believed finally that he had said
something good, and was somewhat pleased in consequence, as he was not
much given to that sort of thing.

Mrs. Catherwaight, while she was alive, lived solely for society, and,
so some people said, not only lived but died for it. She certainly did
go about a great deal, and she used to carry her husband away from his
library every night of every season and left him standing in the
doorways of drawing-rooms, outwardly courteous and distinguished
looking, but inwardly somnolent and unhappy. She was a born and
trained social leader, and her daughter's coming out was to have been
the greatest effort of her life. She regarded it as an event in the
dear child's lifetime second only in importance to her birth; equally
important with her probable marriage and of much more poignant
interest than her possible death. But the great effort proved too much
for the mother, and she died, fondly remembered by her peers and
tenderly referred to by a great many people who could not even show a
card for her Thursdays. Her husband and her daughter were not going
out, of necessity, for more than a year after her death, and then felt
no inclination to begin over again, but lived very much together and
showed themselves only occasionally.

They entertained, though, a great deal, in the way of dinners, and an
invitation to one of these dinners soon became a diploma for
intellectual as well as social qualifications of a very high order.

One was always sure of meeting some one of consideration there, which
was pleasant in itself, and also rendered it easy to let one's friends
know where one had been dining. It sounded so flat to boast abruptly,
"I dined at the Catherwaights' last night"; while it seemed only
natural to remark, "That reminds me of a story that novelist, what's
his name, told at Mr. Catherwaight's," or "That English chap, who's
been in Africa, was at the Catherwaights' the other night, and told
me--"

After one of these dinners people always asked to be allowed to look
over Miss Catherwaight's collection, of which almost everybody had
heard. It consisted of over a hundred medals and decorations which
Miss Catherwaight had purchased while on the long tours she made with
her father in all parts of the world. Each of them had been given as a
reward for some public service, as a recognition of some virtue of the
highest order--for personal bravery, for statesmanship, for great
genius in the arts; and each had been pawned by the recipient or sold
outright. Miss Catherwaight referred to them as her collection of
dishonored honors, and called them variously her Orders of the Knights
of the Almighty Dollar, pledges to patriotism and the pawnshops, and
honors at second-hand.

It was her particular fad to get as many of these together as she
could and to know the story of each. The less creditable the story,
the more highly she valued the medal. People might think it was not a
pretty hobby for a young girl, but they could not help smiling at the
stories and at the scorn with which she told them.

"These," she would say, "are crosses of the Legion of Honor; they are
of the lowest degree, that of chevalier. I keep them in this cigar box
to show how cheaply I got them and how cheaply I hold them. I think
you can get them here in New York for ten dollars; they cost more than
that--about a hundred francs--in Paris. At second-hand, of course. The
French government can imprison you, you know, for ten years, if you
wear one without the right to do so, but they have no punishment for
those who choose to part with them for a mess of pottage.

"All these," she would run on, "are English war medals. See, on this
one is 'Alma,' 'Balaclava,' and 'Sebastopol.' He was quite a veteran,
was he not? Well, he sold this to a dealer on Wardour Street, London,
for five and six. You can get any number of them on the Bowery for
their weight in silver. I tried very hard to get a Victoria Cross when
I was in England, and I only succeeded in getting this one after a
great deal of trouble. They value the cross so highly, you know, that
it is the only other decoration in the case which holds the Order of
the Garter in the Jewel Room at the Tower. It is made of copper, so
that its intrinsic value won't have any weight with the man who gets
it, but I bought this nevertheless for five pounds. The soldier to
whom it belonged had loaded and fired a cannon all alone when the rest
of the men about the battery had run away. He was captured by the
enemy, but retaken immediately afterward by re-enforcements from his
own side, and the general in command recommended him to the Queen for
decoration. He sold his cross to the proprietor of a curiosity shop
and drank himself to death. I felt rather meanly about keeping it and
hunted up his widow to return it to her, but she said I could have it
for a consideration.

"This gold medal was given, as you see, to 'Hiram J. Stillman, of the
sloop _Annie Barker_, for saving the crew of the steamship _Olivia_,
June 18, 1888,' by the President of the United States and both houses
of Congress. I found it on Baxter Street in a pawnshop. The gallant
Hiram J. had pawned it for sixteen dollars and never came back to
claim it."

"But, Miss Catherwaight," some optimist would object, "these men
undoubtedly did do something brave and noble once. You can't get back
of that; and they didn't do it for a medal, either, but because it was
their duty. And so the medal meant nothing to them: their conscience
told them they had done the right thing; they didn't need a stamped
coin to remind them of it, or of their wounds, either, perhaps."

"Quite right; that's quite true," Miss Catherwaight would say. "But
how about this? Look at this gold medal with the diamonds: 'Presented
to Colonel James F. Placer by the men of his regiment, in camp before
Richmond.' Every soldier in the regiment gave something toward that,
and yet the brave gentleman put it up at a game of poker one night,
and the officer who won it sold it to the man who gave it to me. Can
you defend that?"

Miss Catherwaight was well known to the proprietors of the pawnshops
and loan offices on the Bowery and Park Row. They learned to look for
her once a month, and saved what medals they received for her and
tried to learn their stories from the people who pawned them, or else
invented some story which they hoped would answer just as well.

Though her brougham produced a sensation in the unfashionable streets
into which she directed it, she was never annoyed. Her maid went with
her into the shops, and one of the grooms always stood at the door
within call, to the intense delight of the neighborhood. And one day
she found what, from her point of view, was a perfect gem. It was a
poor, cheap-looking, tarnished silver medal, a half-dollar once,
undoubtedly, beaten out roughly into the shape of a heart and engraved
in script by the jeweller of some country town. On one side were two
clasped hands with a wreath around them, and on the reverse was this
inscription: "From Henry Burgoyne to his beloved friend Lewis L.
Lockwood"; and below, "Through prosperity and adversity." That was
all. And here it was among razors and pistols and family Bibles in a
pawnbroker's window. What a story there was in that! These two boy
friends, and their boyish friendship that was to withstand adversity
and prosperity, and all that remained of it was this inscription to
its memory like the wording on a tomb!

"He couldn't have got so much on it any way," said the pawnbroker,
entering into her humor. "I didn't lend him more'n a quarter of a
dollar at the most."

Miss Catherwaight stood wondering if the Lewis L. Lockwood could be
Lewis Lockwood, the lawyer one read so much about. Then she remembered
his middle name was Lyman, and said quickly, "I'll take it, please."

She stepped into the carriage, and told the man to go find a directory
and look for Lewis Lyman Lockwood. The groom returned in a few minutes
and said there was such a name down in the book as a lawyer, and that
his office was such a number on Broadway; it must be near Liberty. "Go
there," said Miss Catherwaight.

Her determination was made so quickly that they had stopped in front
of a huge pile of offices, sandwiched in, one above the other, until
they towered mountains high, before she had quite settled in her mind
what she wanted to know, or had appreciated how strange her errand
might appear. Mr. Lockwood was out, one of the young men in the outer
office said, but the junior partner, Mr. Latimer, was in and would see
her. She had only time to remember that the junior partner was a
dancing acquaintance of hers, before young Mr. Latimer stood before
her smiling, and with her card in his hand.

"Mr. Lockwood is out just at present, Miss Catherwaight," he said,
"but he will be back in a moment. Won't you come into the other room
and wait? I'm sure he won't be away over five minutes. Or is it
something I could do?"

She saw that he was surprised to see her, and a little ill at ease as
to just how to take her visit. He tried to make it appear that he
considered it the most natural thing in the world, but he overdid it,
and she saw that her presence was something quite out of the common.
This did not tend to set her any more at her ease. She already
regretted the step she had taken. What if it should prove to be the
same Lockwood, she thought, and what would they think of her?

"Perhaps you will do better than Mr. Lockwood," she said, as she
followed him into the inner office. "I fear I have come upon a very
foolish errand, and one that has nothing at all to do with the law."

"Not a breach of promise suit, then?" said young Latimer, with a
smile. "Perhaps it is only an innocent subscription to a most worthy
charity. I was afraid at first," he went on lightly, "that it was
legal redress you wanted, and I was hoping that the way I led the
Courdert's cotillion had made you think I could conduct you through
the mazes of the law as well."

"No," returned Miss Catherwaight, with a nervous laugh; "it has to do
with my unfortunate collection. This is what brought me here," she
said, holding out the silver medal. "I came across it just now in the
Bowery. The name was the same, and I thought it just possible Mr.
Lockwood would like to have it; or, to tell you the truth, that he
might tell me what had become of the Henry Burgoyne who gave it to
him."

Young Latimer had the medal in his hand before she had finished
speaking, and was examining it carefully. He looked up with just a
touch of color in his cheeks and straightened himself visibly.

"Please don't be offended," said the fair collector. "I know what you
think. You've heard of my stupid collection, and I know you think I
meant to add this to it. But, indeed, now that I have had time to
think--you see I came here immediately from the pawnshop, and I was so
interested, like all collectors, you know, that I didn't stop to
consider. That's the worst of a hobby; it carries one rough-shod over
other people's feelings, and runs away with one. I beg of you, if you
do know anything about the coin, just to keep it and don't tell me,
and I assure you what little I know I will keep quite to myself."

Young Latimer bowed, and stood looking at her curiously, with the
medal in his hand.

"I hardly know what to say," he began slowly. "It really has a story.
You say you found this on the Bowery, in a pawnshop. Indeed! Well, of
course, you know Mr. Lockwood could not have left it there."

Miss Catherwaight shook her head vehemently and smiled in deprecation.

"This medal was in his safe when he lived on Thirty-fifth Street at
the time he was robbed, and the burglars took this with the rest of
the silver and pawned it, I suppose. Mr. Lockwood would have given
more for it than any one else could have afforded to pay." He paused a
moment, and then continued more rapidly: "Henry Burgoyne is Judge
Burgoyne. Ah! you didn't guess that? Yes, Mr. Lockwood and he were
friends when they were boys. They went to school in Westchester
County. They were Damon and Pythias and that sort of thing. They
roomed together at the State college and started to practise law in
Tuckahoe as a firm, but they made nothing of it, and came on to New
York and began reading law again with Fuller & Mowbray. It was while
they were at school that they had these medals made. There was a mate
to this, you know; Judge Burgoyne had it. Well, they continued to live
and work together. They were both orphans and dependent on themselves.
I suppose that was one of the strongest bonds between them; and they
knew no one in New York, and always spent their spare time together.
They were pretty poor, I fancy, from all Mr. Lockwood has told me, but
they were very ambitious. They were--I'm telling you this, you
understand, because it concerns you somewhat: well, more or less. They
were great sportsmen, and whenever they could get away from the law
office they would go off shooting. I think they were fonder of each
other than brothers even. I've heard Mr. Lockwood tell of the days
they lay in the rushes along the Chesapeake Bay waiting for duck. He
has said often that they were the happiest hours of his life. That was
their greatest pleasure, going off together after duck or snipe along
the Maryland waters. Well, they grew rich and began to know people;
and then they met a girl. It seems they both thought a great deal of
her, as half the New York men did, I am told; and she was the reigning
belle and toast, and had other admirers, and neither met with that
favor she showed--well, the man she married, for instance. But for a
while each thought, for some reason or other, that he was especially
favored. I don't know anything about it. Mr. Lockwood never spoke of
it to me. But they both fell very deeply in love with her, and each
thought the other disloyal, and so they quarrelled; and--and then,
though the woman married, the two men kept apart. It was the one great
passion of their lives, and both were proud, and each thought the
other in the wrong, and so they have kept apart ever since. And--well,
I believe that is all."

Miss Catherwaight had listened in silence and with one little gloved
hand tightly clasping the other.

"Indeed, Mr. Latimer, indeed," she began, tremulously, "I am terribly
ashamed of myself. I seemed to have rushed in where angels fear to
tread. I wouldn't meet Mr. Lockwood _now_ for worlds. Of course I
might have known there was a woman in the case, it adds so much to the
story. But I suppose I must give up my medal. I never could tell that
story, could I?"

"No," said young Latimer, dryly; "I wouldn't if I were you."

Something in his tone, and something in the fact that he seemed to
avoid her eyes, made her drop the lighter vein in which she had been
speaking, and rise to go. There was much that he had not told her, she
suspected, and when she bade him good-by it was with a reserve which
she had not shown at any other time during their interview.

"I wonder who that woman was?" she murmured, as young Latimer turned
from the brougham door and said "Home," to the groom. She thought
about it a great deal that afternoon; at times she repented that she
had given up the medal, and at times she blushed that she should have
been carried in her zeal into such an unwarranted intimacy with
another's story.

She determined finally to ask her father about it. He would be sure to
know, she thought, as he and Mr. Lockwood were contemporaries. Then
she decided finally not to say anything about it at all, for Mr.
Catherwaight did not approve of the collection of dishonored honors as
it was, and she had no desire to prejudice him still further by a
recital of her afternoon's adventure, of which she had no doubt but he
would also disapprove. So she was more than usually silent during the
dinner, which was a tete-a-tete family dinner that night, and she
allowed her father to doze after it in the library in his great chair
without disturbing him with either questions or confessions.

[Illustration with caption: "What can Mr. Lockwood be calling upon me
about?"]

They had been sitting there some time, he with his hands folded on the
evening paper and with his eyes closed, when the servant brought in a
card and offered it to Mr. Catherwaight. Mr. Catherwaight fumbled over
his glasses, and read the name on the card aloud: "'Mr. Lewis L.
Lockwood.' Dear me!" he said; "what can Mr. Lockwood be calling upon
me about?"

Miss Catherwaight sat upright, and reached out for the card with a
nervous, gasping little laugh.

"Oh, I think it must be for me," she said; "I'm quite sure it is
intended for me. I was at his office to-day, you see, to return him
some keepsake of his that I found in an old curiosity shop. Something
with his name on it that had been stolen from him and pawned. It was
just a trifle. You needn't go down, dear; I'll see him. It was I he
asked for, I'm sure; was it not, Morris?"

Morris was not quite sure; being such an old gentleman, he thought it
must be for Mr. Catherwaight he'd come.

Mr. Catherwaight was not greatly interested. He did not like to
disturb his after-dinner nap, and he settled back in his chair again
and refolded his hands.

"I hardly thought he could have come to see me," he murmured,
drowsily; "though I used to see enough and more than enough of Lewis
Lockwood once, my dear," he added with a smile, as he opened his eyes
and nodded before he shut them again. "That was before your mother and
I were engaged, and people did say that young Lockwood's chances at
that time were as good as mine. But they weren't, it seems. He was
very attentive, though; _very_ attentive."

Miss Catherwaight stood startled and motionless at the door from which
she had turned.

"Attentive--to whom?" she asked quickly, and in a very low voice. "To
my mother?"

Mr. Catherwaight did not deign to open his eyes this time, but moved
his head uneasily as if he wished to be let alone.

"To your mother, of course, my child," he answered; "of whom else was
I speaking?"

Miss Catherwaight went down the stairs to the drawing-room slowly, and
paused half-way to allow this new suggestion to settle in her mind.
There was something distasteful to her, something that seemed not
altogether unblamable, in a woman's having two men quarrel about her,
neither of whom was the woman's husband. And yet this girl of whom
Latimer had spoken must be her mother, and she, of course, could do no
wrong. It was very disquieting, and she went on down the rest of the
way with one hand resting heavily on the railing and with the other
pressed against her cheeks. She was greatly troubled. It now seemed to
her very sad indeed that these two one-time friends should live in the
same city and meet, as they must meet, and not recognize each other.
She argued that her mother must have been very young when it happened,
or she would have brought two such men together again. Her mother
could not have known, she told herself; she was not to blame. For she
felt sure that had she herself known of such an accident she would
have done something, said something, to make it right. And she was not
half the woman her mother had been, she was sure of that.

There was something very likable in the old gentleman who came forward
to greet her as she entered the drawing-room; something courtly and of
the old school, of which she was so tired of hearing, but of which she
wished she could have seen more in the men she met. Young Mr. Latimer
had accompanied his guardian, exactly why she did not see, but she
recognized his presence slightly. He seemed quite content to remain in
the background. Mr. Lockwood, as she had expected, explained that he
had called to thank her for the return of the medal. He had it in his
hand as he spoke, and touched it gently with the tips of his fingers
as though caressing it.

"I knew your father very well," said the lawyer, "and I at one time
had the honor of being one of your mother's younger friends. That was
before she was married, many years ago." He stopped and regarded the
girl gravely and with a touch of tenderness. "You will pardon an old
man, old enough to be your father, if he says," he went on, "that you
are greatly like your mother, my dear young lady--greatly like. Your
mother was very kind to me, and I fear I abused her kindness; abused
it by misunderstanding it. There was a great deal of misunderstanding;
and I was proud, and my friend was proud, and so the misunderstanding
continued, until now it has become irretrievable."

He had forgotten her presence apparently, and was speaking more to
himself than to her as he stood looking down at the medal in his hand.

"You were very thoughtful to give me this," he continued; "it was very
good of you. I don't know why I should keep it though, now, although I
was distressed enough when I lost it. But now it is only a reminder of
a time that is past and put away, but which was very, very dear to me.
Perhaps I should tell you that I had a misunderstanding with the
friend who gave it to me, and since then we have never met; have
ceased to know each other. But I have always followed his life as a
judge and as a lawyer, and respected him for his own sake as a man. I
cannot tell--I do not know how he feels toward me."

The old lawyer turned the medal over in his hand and stood looking
down at it wistfully.

The cynical Miss Catherwaight could not stand it any longer.

"Mr. Lockwood," she said, impulsively, "Mr. Latimer has told me why
you and your friend separated, and I cannot bear to think that it was
she--my mother--should have been the cause. She could not have
understood; she must have been innocent of any knowledge of the
trouble she had brought to men who were such good friends of hers and
to each other. It seems to me as though my finding that coin is more
than a coincidence. I somehow think that the daughter is to help undo
the harm that her mother has caused--unwittingly caused. Keep the
medal and don't give it back to me, for I am sure your friend has kept
his, and I am sure he is still your friend at heart. Don't think I am
speaking hastily or that I am thoughtless in what I am saying, but it
seems to me as if friends--good, true friends--were so few that one
cannot let them go without a word to bring them back. But though I am
only a girl, and a very light and unfeeling girl, some people think, I
feel this very much, and I do wish I could bring your old friend back
to you again as I brought back his pledge."

"It has been many years since Henry Burgoyne and I have met," said the
old man, slowly, "and it would be quite absurd to think that he still
holds any trace of that foolish, boyish feeling of loyalty that we
once had for each other. Yet I will keep this, if you will let me, and
I thank you, my dear young lady, for what you have said. I thank you
from the bottom of my heart. You are as good and as kind as your
mother was, and--I can say nothing, believe me, in higher praise."

He rose slowly and made a movement as if to leave the room, and then,
as if the excitement of this sudden return into the past could not be
shaken off so readily, he started forward with a move of sudden
determination.

"I think," he said, "I will go to Henry Burgoyne's house at once, to-
night. I will act on what you have suggested. I will see if this has
or has not been one long, unprofitable mistake. If my visit should be
fruitless, I will send you this coin to add to your collection of
dishonored honors, but if it should result as I hope it may, it will
be your doing, Miss Catherwaight, and two old men will have much to
thank you for. Good-night," he said as he bowed above her hand, "and--
God bless you!"

Miss Catherwaight flushed slightly at what he had said, and sat
looking down at the floor for a moment after the door had closed
behind him.

Young Mr. Latimer moved uneasily in his chair. The routine of the
office had been strangely disturbed that day, and he now failed to
recognize in the girl before him with reddened cheeks and trembling
eyelashes the cold, self-possessed young woman of society whom he had
formerly known.

"You have done very well, if you will let me say so," he began,
gently. "I hope you are right in what you said, and that Mr. Lockwood
will not meet with a rebuff or an ungracious answer. Why," he went on
quickly, "I have seen him take out his gun now every spring and every
fall for the last ten years and clean and polish it and tell what
great shots he and Henry, as he calls him, used to be. And then he
would say he would take a holiday and get off for a little shooting.
But he never went. He would put the gun back into its case again and
mope in his library for days afterward. You see, he never married, and
though he adopted me, in a manner, and is fond of me in a certain way,
no one ever took the place in his heart his old friend had held."

"You will let me know, will you not, at once,--to-night, even,--
whether he succeeds or not?" said the cynical Miss Catherwaight. "You
can understand why I am so deeply interested. I see now why you said I
would not tell the story of that medal. But, after all, it may be the
prettiest story, the only pretty story I have to tell."

Mr. Lockwood had not returned, the man said, when young Latimer
reached the home the lawyer had made for them both. He did not know
what to argue from this, but determined to sit up and wait, and so sat
smoking before the fire and listening with his sense of hearing on a
strain for the first movement at the door.

He had not long to wait. The front door shut with a clash, and he
heard Mr. Lockwood crossing the hall quickly to the library, in which
he waited. Then the inner door was swung back, and Mr. Lockwood came
in with his head high and his eyes smiling brightly.

There was something in his step that had not been there before,
something light and vigorous, and he looked ten years younger. He
crossed the room to his writing-table without speaking and began
tossing the papers about on his desk. Then he closed the rolling-top
lid with a snap and looked up smiling.

"I shall have to ask you to look after things at the office for a
little while," he said. "Judge Burgoyne and I are going to Maryland
for a few weeks' shooting."




VAN BIBBER AND THE SWAN-BOATS


It was very hot in the Park, and young Van Bibber, who has a good
heart and a great deal more money than good-hearted people generally
get, was cross and somnolent. He had told his groom to bring a horse
he wanted to try to the Fifty-ninth Street entrance at ten o'clock,
and the groom had not appeared. Hence Van Bibber's crossness.

He waited as long as his dignity would allow, and then turned off into
a by-lane end dropped on a bench and looked gloomily at the Lohengrin
swans with the paddle-wheel attachment that circle around the lake.
They struck him as the most idiotic inventions he had ever seen, and
he pitied, with the pity of a man who contemplates crossing the ocean
to be measured for his fall clothes, the people who could find delight
in having some one paddle them around an artificial lake.

Two little girls from the East Side, with a lunch basket, and an older
girl with her hair down her back, sat down on a bench beside him and
gazed at the swans.

The place was becoming too popular, and Van Bibber decided to move on.
But the bench on which he sat was in the shade, and the asphalt walk
leading to the street was in the sun, and his cigarette was soothing,
so he ignored the near presence of the three little girls, and
remained where he was.

"I s'pose," said one of the two little girls, in a high, public school
voice, "there's lots to see from those swan-boats that youse can't see
from the banks."

"Oh, lots," assented the girl with long hair.

"If you walked all round the lake, clear all the way round, you could
see all there is to see," said the third, "except what there's in the
middle where the island is."

"I guess it's mighty wild on that island," suggested the youngest.

"Eddie Case he took a trip around the lake on a swan-boat the other
day. He said that it was grand. He said youse could see fishes and
ducks, and that it looked just as if there were snakes and things on
the island."

"What sort of things?" asked the other one, in a hushed voice.

"Well, wild things," explained the elder, vaguely; "bears and animals
like that, that grow in wild places."

Van Bibber lit a fresh cigarette, and settled himself comfortably and
unreservedly to listen.

"My, but I'd like to take a trip just once," said the youngest, under
her breath. Then she clasped her fingers together and looked up
anxiously at the elder girl, who glanced at her with severe reproach.

"Why, Mame!" she said; "ain't you ashamed! Ain't you having a good
time 'nuff without wishing for everything you set your eyes on?"

Van Bibber wondered at this--why humans should want to ride around on
the swans in the first place, and why, if they had such a wild desire,
they should not gratify it.

"Why, it costs more'n it costs to come all the way up town in an open
car," added the elder girl, as if in answer to his unspoken question.

The younger girl sighed at this, and nodded her head in submission,
but blinked longingly at the big swans and the parti-colored awning
and the red seats.

"I beg your pardon," said Van Bibber, addressing himself uneasily to
the eldest girl with long hair, "but if the little girl would like to
go around in one of those things, and--and hasn't brought the change
with her, you know, I'm sure I should be very glad if she'd allow me
to send her around."

"Oh! will you?" exclaimed the little girl, with a jump, and so sharply
and in such a shrill voice that Van Bibber shuddered. But the elder
girl objected.

"I'm afraid maw wouldn't like our taking money from any one we didn't
know," she said with dignity; "but if you're going anyway and want
company--"

"Oh! my, no," said Van Bibber, hurriedly. He tried to picture himself
riding around the lake behind a tin swan with three little girls from
the East Side, and a lunch basket.

"Then," said the head of the trio, "we can't go."

There was such a look of uncomplaining acceptance of this verdict on
the part of the two little girls, that Van Bibber felt uncomfortable.
He looked to the right and to the left, and then said desperately,
"Well, come along." The young man in a blue flannel shirt, who did the
paddling, smiled at Van Bibber's riding-breeches, which were so very
loose at one end and so very tight at the other, and at his gloves and
crop. But Van Bibber pretended not to care. The three little girls
placed the awful lunch basket on the front seat and sat on the middle
one, and Van Bibber cowered in the back. They were hushed in silent
ecstasy when it started, and gave little gasps of pleasure when it
careened slightly in turning. It was shady under the awning, and the
motion was pleasant enough, but Van Bibber was so afraid some one
would see him that he failed to enjoy it.

But as soon as they passed into the narrow straits and were shut in by
the bushes and were out of sight of the people, he relaxed, and began
to play the host. He pointed out the fishes among the rocks at the
edges of the pool, and the sparrows and robins bathing and ruffling
their feathers in the shallow water, and agreed with them about the
possibility of bears, and even tigers, in the wild part of the island,
although the glimpse of the gray helmet of a Park policeman made such
a supposition doubtful.

And it really seemed as though they were enjoying it more than he ever
enjoyed a trip up the Sound on a yacht or across the ocean on a
record-breaking steamship. It seemed long enough before they got back
to Van Bibber, but his guests were evidently but barely satisfied.
Still, all the goodness in his nature would not allow him to go
through that ordeal again.

He stepped out of the boat eagerly and helped out the girl with long
hair as though she had been a princess and tipped the rude young man
who had laughed at him, but who was perspiring now with the work he
had done; and then as he turned to leave the dock he came face to face
with A Girl He Knew and Her brother.

Her brother said, "How're you, Van Bibber? Been taking a trip around
the world in eighty minutes?" And added in a low voice, "Introduce me
to your young lady friends from Hester Street."

"Ah, how're you--quite a surprise!" gasped Van Bibber, while his late
guests stared admiringly at the pretty young lady in the riding-habit,
and utterly refused to move on. "Been taking ride on the lake,"
stammered Van Bibber; "most exhilarating. Young friends of mine--these
young ladies never rode on lake, so I took 'em. Did you see me?"

"Oh, yes, we saw you," said Her brother, dryly, while she only smiled
at him, but so kindly and with such perfect understanding that Van
Bibber grew red with pleasure and bought three long strings of tickets
for the swans at some absurd discount, and gave each little girl a
string.

"There," said Her brother to the little ladies from Hester Street,
"now you can take trips for a week without stopping. Don't try to
smuggle in any laces, and don't forget to fee the smoking-room
steward."

The Girl He Knew said they were walking over to the stables, and that
he had better go get his other horse and join her, which was to be his
reward for taking care of the young ladies. And the three little girls
proceeded to use up the yards of tickets so industriously that they
were sunburned when they reached the tenement, and went to bed
dreaming of a big white swan, and a beautiful young gentleman in
patent-leather riding-boots and baggy breeches.




VAN BIBBER'S BURGLAR


There had been a dance up town, but as Van Bibber could not find Her
there, he accepted young Travers's suggestion to go over to Jersey
City and see a "go" between "Dutchy" Mack and a colored person
professionally known as the Black Diamond. They covered up all signs
of their evening dress with their great-coats, and filled their
pockets with cigars, for the smoke which surrounds a "go" is trying to
sensitive nostrils, and they also fastened their watches to both key-
chains. Alf Alpin, who was acting as master of ceremonies, was greatly
pleased and flattered at their coming, and boisterously insisted on
their sitting on the platform. The fact was generally circulated among
the spectators that the "two gents in high hats" had come in a
carriage, and this and their patent-leather boots made them objects of
keen interest. It was even whispered that they were the "parties" who
were putting up the money to back the Black Diamond against the
"Hester Street Jackson." This in itself entitled them to respect. Van
Bibber was asked to hold the watch, but he wisely declined the honor,
which was given to Andy Spielman, the sporting reporter of the
_Track and Ring_, whose watch-case was covered with diamonds, and was
just the sort of a watch a timekeeper should hold.

It was two o'clock before "Dutchy" Mack's backer threw the sponge into
the air, and three before they reached the city. They had another
reporter in the cab with them besides the gentleman who had bravely
held the watch in the face of several offers to "do for" him; and as
Van Bibber was ravenously hungry, and as he doubted that he could get
anything at that hour at the club, they accepted Spielman's invitation
and went for a porterhouse steak and onions at the Owl's Nest, Gus
McGowan's all-night restaurant on Third Avenue.

It was a very dingy, dirty place, but it was as warm as the engine-
room of a steamboat, and the steak was perfectly done and tender. It
was too late to go to bed, so they sat around the table, with their
chairs tipped back and their knees against its edge. The two club men
had thrown off their great-coats, and their wide shirt fronts and silk
facings shone grandly in the smoky light of the oil lamps and the red
glow from the grill in the corner. They talked about the life the
reporters led, and the Philistines asked foolish questions, which the
gentleman of the press answered without showing them how foolish they
were.

"And I suppose you have all sorts of curious adventures," said Van
Bibber, tentatively.

"Well, no, not what I would call adventures," said one of the
reporters. "I have never seen anything that could not be explained or
attributed directly to some known cause, such as crime or poverty or
drink. You may think at first that you have stumbled on something
strange and romantic, but it comes to nothing. You would suppose that
in a great city like this one would come across something that could
not be explained away something mysterious or out of the common, like
Stevenson's Suicide Club. But I have not found it so. Dickens once
told James Payn that the most curious thing he ever saw In his rambles
around London was a ragged man who stood crouching under the window of
a great house where the owner was giving a ball. While the man hid
beneath a window on the ground floor, a woman wonderfully dressed and
very beautiful raised the sash from the inside and dropped her bouquet
down into the man's hand, and he nodded and stuck it under his coat
and ran off with it.

"I call that, now, a really curious thing to see. But I have never
come across anything like it, and I have been in every part of this
big city, and at every hour of the night and morning, and I am not
lacking in imagination either, but no captured maidens have ever
beckoned to me from barred windows nor 'white hands waved from a
passing hansom.' Balzac and De Musset and Stevenson suggest that they
have had such adventures, but they never come to me. It is all
commonplace and vulgar, and always ends in a police court or with a
'found drowned' in the North River."

McGowan, who had fallen into a doze behind the bar, woke suddenly and
shivered and rubbed his shirt-sleeves briskly. A woman knocked at the
side door and begged for a drink "for the love of heaven," and the man
who tended the grill told her to be off. They could hear her feeling
her way against the wall and cursing as she staggered out of the
alley. Three men came in with a hack driver and wanted everybody to
drink with them, and became insolent when the gentlemen declined, and
were in consequence hustled out one at a time by McGowan, who went to
sleep again immediately, with his head resting among the cigar boxes
and pyramids of glasses at the back of the bar, and snored.

"You see," said the reporter, "it is all like this. Night in a great
city is not picturesque and it is not theatrical. It is sodden,
sometimes brutal, exciting enough until you get used to it, but it
runs in a groove. It is dramatic, but the plot is old and the motives
and characters always the same."

The rumble of heavy market wagons and the rattle of milk carts told
them that it was morning, and as they opened the door the cold fresh
air swept into the place and made them wrap their collars around their
throats and stamp their feet. The morning wind swept down the cross-
street from the East River and the lights of the street lamps and of
the saloon looked old and tawdry. Travers and the reporter went off to
a Turkish bath, and the gentleman who held the watch, and who had been
asleep for the last hour, dropped into a nighthawk and told the man to
drive home. It was almost clear now and very cold, and Van Bibber
determined to walk. He had the strange feeling one gets when one stays
up until the sun rises, of having lost a day somewhere, and the dance
he had attended a few hours before seemed to have come off long ago,
and the fight in Jersey City was far back in the past.

The houses along the cross-street through which he walked were as dead
as so many blank walls, and only here and there a lace curtain waved
out of the open window where some honest citizen was sleeping. The
street was quite deserted; not even a cat or a policeman moved on it
and Van Bibber's footsteps sounded brisk on the sidewalk. There was a
great house at the corner of the avenue and the cross-street on which
he was walking. The house faced the avenue and a stone wall ran back
to the brown stone stable which opened on the side street. There was a
door in this wall, and as Van Bibber approached it on his solitary
walk it opened cautiously, and a man's head appeared in it for an
instant and was withdrawn again like a flash, and the door snapped to.
Van Bibber stopped and looked at the door and at the house and up and
down the street. The house was tightly closed, as though some one was
lying inside dead, and the streets were still empty.

Van Bibber could think of nothing in his appearance so dreadful as to
frighten an honest man, so he decided the face he had had a glimpse of
must belong to a dishonest one. It was none of his business, he
assured himself, but it was curious, and he liked adventure, and he
would have liked to prove his friend the reporter, who did not believe
in adventure, in the wrong. So he approached the door silently, and
jumped and caught at the top of the wall and stuck one foot on the
handle of the door, and, with the other on the knocker, drew himself
up and looked cautiously down on the other side. He had done this so
lightly that the only noise he made was the rattle of the door-knob on
which his foot had rested, and the man inside thought that the one
outside was trying to open the door, and placed his shoulder to it and
pressed against it heavily. Van Bibber, from his perch on the top of
the wall, looked down directly on the other's head and shoulders. He
could see the top of the man's head only two feet below, and he also
saw that in one hand he held a revolver and that two bags filled with
projecting articles of different sizes lay at his feet.

It did not need explanatory notes to tell Van Bibber that the man
below had robbed the big house on the corner, and that if it had not
been for his having passed when he did the burglar would have escaped
with his treasure. His first thought was that he was not a policeman,
and that a fight with a burglar was not in his line of life; and this
was followed by the thought that though the gentleman who owned the
property in the two bags was of no interest to him, he was, as a
respectable member of society, more entitled to consideration than the
man with the revolver.

The fact that he was now, whether he liked it or not, perched on the
top of the wall like Humpty Dumpty, and that the burglar might see him
and shoot him the next minute, had also an immediate influence on his
movements. So he balanced himself cautiously and noiselessly and
dropped upon the man's head and shoulders, bringing him down to the
flagged walk with him and under him. The revolver went off once in the
struggle, but before the burglar could know how or from where his
assailant had come, Van Bibber was standing up over him and had driven
his heel down on his hand and kicked the pistol out of his fingers.
Then he stepped quickly to where it lay and picked it up and said,
"Now, if you try to get up I'll shoot at you." He felt an unwarranted
and ill-timedly humorous inclination to add, "and I'll probably miss
you," but subdued it. The burglar, much to Van Bibber's astonishment,
did not attempt to rise, but sat up with his hands locked across his
knees and said: "Shoot ahead. I'd a damned sight rather you would."

His teeth were set and his face desperate and bitter, and hopeless to
a degree of utter hopelessness that Van Bibber had never imagined.

"Go ahead," reiterated the man, doggedly, "I won't move. Shoot me."

It was a most unpleasant situation. Van Bibber felt the pistol
loosening in his hand, and he was conscious of a strong inclination to
lay it down and ask the burglar to tell him all about it.

"You haven't got much heart," said Van Bibber, finally. "You're a
pretty poor sort of a burglar, I should say."

"What's the use?" said the man, fiercely. "I won't go back--I won't go
back there alive. I've served my time forever in that hole. If I have
to go back again--s'help me if I don't do for a keeper and die for it.
But I won't serve there no more."

"Go back where?" asked Van Bibber, gently, and greatly interested; "to
prison?"

"To prison, yes!" cried the man, hoarsely: "to a grave. That's where.
Look at my face," he said, "and look at my hair. That ought to tell
you where I've been. With all the color gone out of my skin, and all
the life out of my legs. You needn't be afraid of me. I couldn't hurt
you if I wanted to. I'm a skeleton and a baby, I am. I couldn't kill a
cat. And now you're going to send me back again for another lifetime.
For twenty years, this time, into that cold, forsaken hole, and after
I done my time so well and worked so hard." Van Bibber shifted the
pistol from one hand to the other and eyed his prisoner doubtfully.

"How long have you been out?" he asked, seating himself on the steps
of the kitchen and holding the revolver between his knees. The sun was
driving the morning mist away, and he had forgotten the cold.

"I got out yesterday," said the man.

Van Bibber glanced at the bags and lifted the revolver. "You didn't
waste much time," he said.

"No," answered the man, sullenly, "no, I didn't. I knew this place and
I wanted money to get West to my folks, and the Society said I'd have
to wait until I earned it, and I couldn't wait. I haven't seen my wife
for seven years, nor my daughter. Seven years, young man; think of
that--seven years. Do you know how long that is? Seven years without
seeing your wife or your child! And they're straight people, they
are," he added, hastily. "My wife moved West after I was put away and
took another name, and my girl never knew nothing about me. She thinks
I'm away at sea. I was to join 'em. That was the plan. I was to join
'em, and I thought I could lift enough here to get the fare, and now,"
he added, dropping his face in his hands, "I've got to go back. And I
had meant to live straight after I got West,--God help me, but I did!
Not that it makes much difference now. An' I don't care whether you
believe it or not neither," he added, fiercely.

"I didn't say whether I believed it or not," answered Van Bibber, with
grave consideration.

He eyed the man for a brief space without speaking, and the burglar
looked back at him, doggedly and defiantly, and with not the faintest
suggestion of hope in his eyes, or of appeal for mercy. Perhaps it was
because of this fact, or perhaps it was the wife and child that moved
Van Bibber, but whatever his motives were, he acted on them promptly.
"I suppose, though," he said, as though speaking to himself, "that I
ought to give you up."

"I'll never go back alive," said the burglar, quietly.

"Well, that's bad, too," said Van Bibber. "Of course I don't know
whether you're lying or not, and as to your meaning to live honestly,
I very much doubt it; but I'll give you a ticket to wherever your wife
is, and I'll see you on the train. And you can get off at the next
station and rob my house to-morrow night, if you feel that way about
it. Throw those bags inside that door where the servant will see them
before the milkman does, and walk on out ahead of me, and keep your
hands in your pockets, and don't try to run. I have your pistol, you
know."

The man placed the bags inside the kitchen door; and, with a doubtful
look at his custodian, stepped out into the street, and walked, as he
was directed to do, toward the Grand Central station. Van Bibber kept
just behind him, and kept turning the question over in his mind as to
what he ought to do. He felt very guilty as he passed each policeman,
but he recovered himself when he thought of the wife and child who
lived in the West, and who were "straight."

"Where to?" asked Van Bibber, as he stood at the ticket-office window.
"Helena, Montana," answered the man with, for the first time, a look
of relief. Van Bibber bought the ticket and handed it to the burglar.
"I suppose you know," he said, "that you can sell that at a place down
town for half the money." "Yes, I know that," said the burglar. There
was a half-hour before the train left, and Van Bibber took his charge
into the restaurant and watched him eat everything placed before him,
with his eyes glancing all the while to the right or left. Then Van
Bibber gave him some money and told him to write to him, and shook
hands with him. The man nodded eagerly and pulled off his hat as the
car drew out of the station; and Van Bibber came down town again with
the shop girls and clerks going to work, still wondering if he had
done the right thing.

He went to his rooms and changed his clothes, took a cold bath, and
crossed over to Delmonico's for his breakfast, and, while the waiter
laid the cloth in the cafe, glanced at the headings in one of the
papers. He scanned first with polite interest the account of the dance
on the night previous and noticed his name among those present. With
greater interest he read of the fight between "Dutchy" Mack and the
"Black Diamond," and then he read carefully how "Abe" Hubbard, alias
"Jimmie the Gent," a burglar, had broken jail in New Jersey, and had
been traced to New York. There was a description of the man, and Van
Bibber breathed quickly as he read it. "The detectives have a clew of
his whereabouts," the account said; "if he is still in the city they
are confident of recapturing him. But they fear that the same friends
who helped him to break jail will probably assist him from the country
or to get out West."

"They may do that," murmured Van Bibber to himself, with a smile of
grim contentment; "they probably will."

Then he said to the waiter, "Oh, I don't know. Some bacon and eggs and
green things and coffee."




VAN BIBBER AS BEST MAN


Young Van Bibber came up to town in June from Newport to see his
lawyer about the preparation of some papers that needed his signature.
He found the city very hot and close, and as dreary and as empty as a
house that has been shut up for some time while its usual occupants
are away in the country.

As he had to wait over for an afternoon train, and as he was down
town, he decided to lunch at a French restaurant near Washington
Square, where some one had told him you could get particular things
particularly well cooked. The tables were set on a terrace with plants
and flowers about them, and covered with a tricolored awning. There
were no jangling horse-car bells nor dust to disturb him, and almost
all the other tables were unoccupied. The waiters leaned against these
tables and chatted in a French argot; and a cool breeze blew through
the plants and billowed the awning, so that, on the whole, Van Bibber
was glad he had come.

There was, beside himself, an old Frenchman scolding over his late
breakfast; two young artists with Van Dyke beards, who ordered the
most remarkable things in the same French argot that the waiters
spoke; and a young lady and a young gentleman at the table next to his
own. The young man's back was toward him, and he could only see the
girl when the youth moved to one side. She was very young and very
pretty, and she seemed in a most excited state of mind from the tip of
her wide-brimmed, pointed French hat to the points of her patent-
leather ties. She was strikingly well-bred in appearance, and Van
Bibber wondered why she should be dining alone with so young a man.

"It wasn't my fault," he heard the youth say earnestly. "How could I
know he would be out of town? and anyway it really doesn't matter.
Your cousin is not the only clergyman in the city."

"Of course not," said the girl, almost tearfully, "but they're not my
cousins and he is, and that would have made it so much, oh, so very
much different. I'm awfully frightened!"

"Runaway couple," commented Van Bibber. "Most interesting. Read about
'em often; never seen 'em. Most interesting."

He bent his head over an entree, but he could not help hearing what
followed, for the young runaways were indifferent to all around them,
and though he rattled his knife and fork in a most vulgar manner, they
did not heed him nor lower their voices.

"Well, what are you going to do?" said the girl, severely but not
unkindly. "It doesn't seem to me that you are exactly rising to the
occasion."

"Well, I don't know," answered the youth, easily. "We're safe here
anyway. Nobody we know ever comes here, and if they did they are out
of town now. You go on and eat something, and I'll get a directory and
look up a lot of clergymen's addresses, and then we can make out a
list and drive around in a cab until we find one who has not gone off
on his vacation. We ought to be able to catch the Fall River boat back
at five this afternoon; then we can go right on to Boston from Fall
River to-morrow morning and run down to Narragansett during the day."

"They'll never forgive us," said the girl.

"Oh, well, that's all right," exclaimed the young man, cheerfully.
"Really, you're the most uncomfortable young person I ever ran away
with. One might think you were going to a funeral. You were willing
enough two days ago, and now you don't help me at all. Are you sorry?"
he asked, and then added, "but please don't say so, even if you are."

"No, not sorry, exactly," said the girl; "but, indeed, Ted, it is
going to make so much talk. If we only had a girl with us, or if you
had a best man, or if we had witnesses, as they do in England, and a
parish registry, or something of that sort; or if Cousin Harold had
only been at home to do the marrying."

The young gentleman called Ted did not look, judging from the
expression of his shoulders, as if he were having a very good time.

He picked at the food on his plate gloomily, and the girl took out her
handkerchief and then put it resolutely back again and smiled at him.
The youth called the waiter and told him to bring a directory, and as
he turned to give the order Van Bibber recognized him and he
recognized Van Bibber. Van Bibber knew him for a very nice boy, of a
very good Boston family named Standish, and the younger of two sons.
It was the elder who was Van Bibber's particular friend. The girl saw
nothing of this mutual recognition, for she was looking with startled
eyes at a hansom that had dashed up the side street and was turning
the corner.

"Ted, O Ted!" she gasped. "It's your brother. There! In that hansom. I
saw him perfectly plainly. Oh, how did he find us? What shall we do?"

Ted grew very red and then very white.

"Standish," said Van Bibber, jumping up and reaching for his hat, "pay
this chap for these things, will you, and I'll get rid of your
brother."

Van Bibber descended the steps lighting a cigar as the elder Standish
came up them on a jump.

"Hello, Standish!" shouted the New Yorker. "Wait a minute; where are
you going? Why, it seems to rain Standishes to-day! First see your
brother; then I see you. What's on?"

"You've seen him?" cried the Boston man, eagerly. "Yes, and where is
he? Was she with him? Are they married? Am I in time?"

Van Bibber answered these different questions to the effect that he
had seen young Standish and Mrs. Standish not a half an hour before,
and that they were just then taking a cab for Jersey City, whence they
were to depart for Chicago.

"The driver who brought them here, and who told me where they were,
said they could not have left this place by the time I would reach
it," said the elder brother, doubtfully.

"That's so," said the driver of the cab, who had listened curiously.
"I brought 'em here not more'n half an hour ago. Just had time to get
back to the depot. They can't have gone long."

"Yes, but they have," said Van Bibber. "However, if you get over to
Jersey City in time for the 2.30, you can reach Chicago almost as soon
as they do. They are going to the Palmer House, they said."

"Thank you, old fellow," shouted Standish, jumping back into his
hansom. "It's a terrible business. Pair of young fools. Nobody
objected to the marriage, only too young, you know. Ever so much
obliged."

"Don't mention it," said Van Bibber, politely.

"Now, then," said that young man, as he approached the frightened
couple trembling on the terrace, "I've sent your brother off to
Chicago. I do not know why I selected Chicago as a place where one
would go on a honeymoon. But I'm not used to lying and I'm not very
good at it. Now, if you will introduce me, I'll see what can be done
toward getting you two babes out of the woods."

Standish said, "Miss Cambridge, this is Mr. Cortlandt Van Bibber, of
whom you have heard my brother speak," and Miss Cambridge said she was
very glad to meet Mr. Van Bibber even under such peculiarly trying
circumstances.

"Now what you two want to do," said Van Bibber, addressing them as
though they were just about fifteen years old and he were at least
forty, "is to give this thing all the publicity you can."

"What?" chorused the two runaways, in violent protest.

"Certainly," said Van Bibber. "You were about to make a fatal mistake.
You were about to go to some unknown clergyman of an unknown parish,
who would have married you in a back room, without a certificate or a
witness, just like any eloping farmer's daughter and lightning-rod
agent. Now it's different with you two. Why you were not married
respectably in church I don't know, and I do not intend to ask, but a
kind Providence has sent me to you to see that there is no talk nor
scandal, which is such bad form, and which would have got your names
into all the papers. I am going to arrange this wedding properly, and
you will kindly remain here until I send a carriage for you. Now just
rely on me entirely and eat your luncheon in peace. It's all going to
come out right--and allow me to recommend the salad, which is
especially good."

Van Bibber first drove madly to the Little Church Around the Corner,
where he told the kind old rector all about it, and arranged to have
the church open and the assistant organist in her place, and a
district-messenger boy to blow the bellows, punctually at three
o'clock. "And now," he soliloquized, "I must get some names. It
doesn't matter much whether they happen to know the high contracting
parties or not, but they must be names that everybody knows. Whoever
is in town will be lunching at Delmonico's, and the men will be at the
clubs." So he first went to the big restaurant, where, as good luck
would have it, he found Mrs. "Regy" Van Arnt and Mrs. "Jack" Peabody,
and the Misses Brookline, who had run up the Sound for the day on the
yacht _Minerva_ of the Boston Yacht Club, and he told them how things
were and swore them to secrecy, and told them to bring what men they
could pick up.

At the club he pressed four men into service who knew everybody and
whom everybody knew, and when they protested that they had not been
properly invited and that they only knew the bride and groom by sight,
he told them that made no difference, as it was only their names he
wanted. Then he sent a messenger boy to get the biggest suit of rooms
on the Fall River boat and another one for flowers, and then he put
Mrs. "Regy" Van Arnt into a cab and sent her after the bride, and, as
best man, he got into another cab and carried off the groom.

"I have acted either as best man or usher forty-two times now," said
Van Bibber, as they drove to the church, "and this is the first time I
ever appeared in either capacity in russia-leather shoes and a blue
serge yachting suit. But then," he added, contentedly, "you ought to
see the other fellows. One of them is in a striped flannel."

Mrs. "Regy" and Miss Cambridge wept a great deal on the way up town,
but the bride was smiling and happy when she walked up the aisle to
meet her prospective husband, who looked exceedingly conscious before
the eyes of the men, all of whom he knew by sight or by name, and not
one of whom he had ever met before. But they all shook hands after it
was over, and the assistant organist played the Wedding March, and one
of the club men insisted in pulling a cheerful and jerky peal on the
church bell in the absence of the janitor, and then Van Bibber hurled
an old shoe and a handful of rice--which he had thoughtfully collected
from the chef at the club--after them as they drove off to the boat.

"Now," said Van Bibber, with a proud sigh of relief and satisfaction,
"I will send that to the papers, and when it is printed to-morrow it
will read like one of the most orthodox and one of the smartest
weddings of the season. And yet I can't help thinking--"

"Well?" said Mrs. "Regy," as he paused doubtfully.

"Well, I can't help thinking," continued Van Bibber, "of Standish's
older brother racing around Chicago with the thermometer at 102 in the
shade. I wish I had only sent him to Jersey City. It just shows," he
added, mournfully, "that when a man is not practised in lying, he
should leave it alone."






End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Gallegher and Other Stories
by Richard Harding Davis

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GALLEGHER AND OTHER STORIES ***

This file should be named gllgh10.txt or gllgh10.zip
Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, gllgh11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, gllgh10a.txt

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
even years after the official publication date.

Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.

Most people start at our Web sites at:
http://gutenberg.net or
http://promo.net/pg

These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).


Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03

Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90

Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.

Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):

eBooks Year Month

    1  1971 July
   10  1991 January
  100  1994 January
 1000  1997 August
 1500  1998 October
 2000  1999 December
 2500  2000 December
 3000  2001 November
 4000  2001 October/November
 6000  2002 December*
 9000  2003 November*
10000  2004 January*


The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.

We need your donations more than ever!

As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
that have responded.

As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.

In answer to various questions we have received on this:

We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
just ask.

While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
donate.

International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
ways.

Donations by check or money order may be sent to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109

Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
method other than by check or money order.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.

We need your donations more than ever!

You can get up to date donation information online at:

http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html


***

If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.

We would prefer to send you information by email.


**The Legal Small Print**


(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.

To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word
     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
     let us know your plans and to work out the details.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.

The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com

[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
they hardware or software or any other related product without
express permission.]

*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*

