Front matter (continued 4)

First come the market-laborers, with shoulders bowed and muscles cramped from the bearing of many burdens. Upon their heels march the pale conscripts of the sweatshops, their hands shaking, their cheeks sunken, their eyes hot from loss of sleep. Follow the sad-lipped factory-girls, women before their time, old women before their youth, and then the long line of predestined shop-clerks, most of them still in short skirts and all of them, befittingly, in mourning-black. Swiftly they go, the whole corps of them, the whole corps strangely silent.

The street is not emptied of them before it is filled again, now by solemn children on their way to school, children whose gaze is fixed, whose mouths are maturely set, and whose voices, when they are heard at all, are high, strident, nervous. As these go by, the shops begin to do business: the cheap food-shops, the old-clothes shops, the shops that sell second-hand five-cent novels for a copper, and the pawnbrokers'. The shawl-hooded housewives clutter in and out, selling first that they may buy afterward, and continuing like ants swarming about an ant-hill until noon strikes and the children parade stolidly away from school for luncheon, and back again.

At that hour the underworld of Rivington Street enough recovers from its drunkenness of the night preceding to stagger forth and drink again. The doors of the shouldering saloons swing open and bang shut in a running accompaniment, and the highway rocks with it until a cloud of clattering two-wheeled push-carts swoops from "The Push-Cart Garage" around the corner and alights as if it were a plague of pestilent flies. Bearded Jews propel these, Jews with shining derbies far back upon their heads, who work sometimes for themselves, but more often for the owners of the push-cart trust, who squabble for positions in the gutter where an impotent law forbids any of them long to remain, but where, once entrenched, they stand for hours, selling stockings at five cents and shirts at ten, mirrors and vegetables, suspenders and lithographs, shoestrings and picture-postcards, collars of linen and celluloid, all sorts of cheap dress-material, every description of brush, fruit, and cigar-butts.

The carts are end-to-end now; one could walk upon them from cross-street to cross-street. Each has its separate gasoline torch leaping up, in flame and smoke, to the descending darkness. Upon them charge the returning army of workers. The crowd is all moving eastward; you could not make six yards of progress to the west; the sidewalks overflow, the street is filled. The silence of the morning has changed to a mad chorus of discords. The thousand weary feet shuffle, the venders shriek their wares; there is every imaginable sound of strife and traffic, but there is no distinguishable note of mirth. Wagons jostle pedestrians, graze children, are blocked, held up, turned away. The thoroughfare is like a boiling cauldron; it can hold no more, and still it must hold more and more.

Only very slowly, as the night wears on, do the crowd and noise lessen; but at last, by tardy degrees, they do lessen. Imperceptibly, but inevitably, even this portion of New York breathes somewhat easier. By twos and threes the people melt away; a note at a time, the cries weaken and the shuffling dies; and finally, in the small hours of the morning, Rivington Street turns over, with a troubled sigh, to a restless doze.

But to doze only. Its bad conscience will grant it no absolute oblivion, no perfect rest, however brief. Cats yell from the dizzy edges of the lower roofs; dogs howl from the doorsteps. Back in the narrow courts and alleys and passages, drunken battles are won and lost. The elevated cars roar out the minutes through the nocturnal distances. An ambulance clangs into a byway street. A patrol-wagon clatters past. Rivington Street turns and tosses on its hot couch, and through its dreams slink hideous shadows that dare not show themselves by day. One, ten, a hundred, each alone, they come and go: vague, inhuman. And then, reluctantly, the hesitant dawn creeps shivering out of the East River, and the weary day begins again.

Into this street—into its noisiest quarter at its noisiest time—the cab that bore Violet on her way to liberty at last turned and proceeded as far under the flaring gasoline torches as the evening crowd of workers, buyers, and sellers, would permit. The girl, through the dark thoroughfares that had preceded it, had answered a score of questions, which Dyker had asked her, the fever of escape beating high in her breast and tossing ready replies to her heated lips; but now, in the roar and brilliance of Rivington Street's nocturnal traffic, there had come upon her a terror almost equal to that which had assailed her when, with Max for her guide, the lighted length of East Fourteenth Street had first unrolled itself before her. The city was again an inimical monster awaiting her descent from the cab, and the newly acquired habit of seclusion, the habit of the prisoner, recoiled upon her. Freedom was strange; it became awesome, and when the horse was stopped and Violet knew that she must soon fare alone, she cowered in a corner, breathing hard.

"Can't go no furder, boss," said the cabby, leaning far around from his seat. "Where to now?"

"Nowhere right away," answered Dyker. "Just stand where you are for a minute."

Then he turned to Violet.

"Now," he said, not unkindly, "I'm afraid I'll have to drop you here. It wouldn't do for me to figure publicly as an active agent in this case, you know. But you needn't worry. Just get out and walk to the next corner. Turn to your right, take the next cross-street to your left, go up the first narrow street you come to, and your friend's house ought to be about the third in the row. It will be a little dark, but you won't have any trouble finding it."

Violet hesitated.

"I hope I won't," she said.

"Surely not. If you have, just ask the way of the first policeman you see."

"Not a policeman, Mr. Dyker!"

"Of course, a policeman. He won't hurt you as long as you keep your cloak tight. Now, you're sure you've given me the right address?"

"I gave you the one the man gave me."

"Yes, but I mean you're not lying to me?"

Violet's wide eyes should have been sufficient denial.

"Why would I do that?" she asked.

"That's so; only I thought—well, I beg your pardon, Violet. You have my office-address on that card. I'll send for you in a day or two—be sure to be home every afternoon—and then we'll fix Madame Rose with the District-Attorney.—Good-by. Sure you're not afraid?"

Her gratitude would not permit her to acknowledge fear.

"Not afraid," she smiled, rather grimly.

"Then remember: the first street to your right, the next to your left, and then to your right again—third or fourth house in the row."

He opened the cab-door and alighted, holding out his hand.

She straightened her beaver hat, drew the folds of her dark cloak tightly over the betraying crimson of her kimona, and, helped by his grasp, followed him to the swarming curb.

"I—I don't know how to thank you," she said.

"Then don't try," returned Dyker, laughing easily. "You can make it all right with me when you testify against Rose."

She kept his hand a moment longer, partly in fear of the human multitude about her and partly in genuine gratitude.

"But I do thank you," she said.

Dyker, not too well liking the white light of publicity in which this little scene was being enacted, pressed her hand and dropped it.

"That's all right," he responded. "Just don't forget your promise." He stepped back into the cab. "Good-by, and good luck," he said.

"Good-by," he heard her answer, and then, with his head out of the cab-window, he saw her pause bewilderedly. "To your right," he cautioned.

He watched her turn. He saw her plunge into the crowd. He saw the crowd swallow her up.

"Take me over to my office," he ordered the driver, and added his address.

Once there, he dismissed the cab, climbed the steps of what seemed an old and modest little house, and, opening the door and turning into the front room, lit a gas-jet the flame of which revealed an apartment surprisingly new and arrogant. The walls were lined with new bookcases holding rows of new law-books, and surrounded by rows of new chairs. The flat-top desk in the center, at which his stenographer sat by daylight, was a new desk, with new wire-baskets upon it, and a new telephone, to which Dyker now immediately proceeded and called a number.

"Hello," he said into the transmitter, adopting the low tone that he always used in his wired conversations. "Is that Schleger's?—It is?—That you, Ludwig?—This is Dyker.—Yes, good-evening, Ludwig.—Yes, pretty good, thank you. How are you, and how's business?—That's good. Mrs. Schleger and the babies all right?—I'll bet that boy's gained three pounds!—He has? I'm glad to hear it. You're a wonder.—Yes.—That's what I said. And, say, Ludwig, is O'Malley anywhere around?—He isn't?—Hasn't been in this evening?—Oh! Well, I wonder where I can find him.—You don't? Perhaps he's at Dugan's place.—No, it's not anything important: I just wanted to take a drink with him, that's all. He's sure to be at Dugan's or Venturio's, but I guess I won't bother. Ever so much obliged, Ludwig.—Good-by."

In spite of his word, Dyker did, however, bother. He called three other numbers in his quest of the political boss, and when he found him, the underling made a pressing appointment for an important conference on the next morning, though what it was that he wanted then to discuss he carefully neglected to mention over a telephone-wire.

He hung up the receiver in a glow of satisfaction.

"And now," he said, "I think I'll get away for the night. I don't care to have any arguments with Rose for a day or two."

Yet, even as he said it, the telephone-bell uttered its staccato summons. He stood uncertainly beside the desk.

"She wouldn't have the nerve to use the wire," he argued. "Perhaps it's O'Malley with more to say."

Again the bell rang, and his curiosity overcame his caution. He took up the receiver.

"Hello!" he said sharply, and then his tone mellowed, for the voice that came to him across the hurrying New York night was the voice of Marian Lennox.

"Is that Mr. Dyker's office?" it asked.

"It is the head of the firm himself," he answered, "and mighty glad to hear from you."

"I am glad you're glad," the voice pursued, "because I want to ask a favor."

"It is as good as performed. What is it?"

"I have been down town, and remained longer than I intended, and I want you, please, to take me home."

"I thought you were asking a favor, not bestowing one. Where are you?"

"At the settlement."

"In Rivington Street?" Wesley set his teeth as he asked it.

"Yes."

"Very well, I'll be over right away."

He rang off and left the office. He was sorry that he had dismissed the cab, for he expected to need it when he reached the first stage of his journey; but the way was not long to the place that Marian had named, and, even had it been twice as far to the settlement, Dyker, who walked thither with the feet of chagrin, would not have remarked the distance.

In the midst of Rivington Street, in a house that used, long ago, to be a Methodist parsonage, a little group of devoted women are doing their best to redeem, by social activities, the people of the neighborhood from the benighted condition in which the people's lot is cast. This best has now been done for more years than a few, and the people, still considering it necessary to remain alive, and still knowing that to remain alive they must submit to the economic system imposed upon them, continue discouragingly unredeemed. But the devoted women, though they neglect the disease for its symptoms, persist as only feminine natures can persist.

They are college-bred women with the limitations and emancipations of their class; and they have a great deal to occupy their attention besides their essays in social entertainment. For the most part they pass their days in really practical investigation. One of them will inspect the public schools and impartially consider curricula and ventilation. Another will visit tenements and ask housewives personal questions for the tabular benefit of the Russell Sage Foundation. A third goes into the laundries of the best hotels and finds that these hostelries force their washerwomen to sleep twenty in a room. Yet, when they return to Rivington Street, these daylight investigators spur their wearied nerves to further exertion and go forward, not to teach the toilers the practical cause and remedy of the economic evil, but to form the boys and girls, the young women and young men, into reading groups, debating clubs, sewing circles, cooking classes, and elocutionary juntas. Their zeal is boundless, their martyrdom sadly genuine, and, if there is humor, there is something more than humor in their ultimate complaint:

"Some of our people we retain, but most of them slip away, and, even with the best of fortune, we seem, somehow, able to do so little."

Dyker knew the place by reputation. He had always scorned it for its own sake, and now he had come to hate it for Marian's. For want of a better term, it may be repeated that he was in love with Marian. Moreover, he wished the assistance that an early marriage with the daughter of a wealthy department-store owner would give him in the coming campaign. And, finally, his peculiar legal activities were already well enough known on the East Side to make it probable that any young woman entering the settlement would speedily learn of them.

After the night of the opera his cooler reflection had rejected Marian's plan of joining the Rivington Street colony as a fervently girlish dream destined to fade before the reality of action. He had decided that the best way to aid its dissipation was no longer to combat it, and he had even, during the months that had followed, seen Marian but rarely, and never alone. Occupied with politics and knowing the tactical value of restraint, he had not so much as pressed his wooing. He had relied upon what he chose to describe as his sweetheart's basic commonsense to work out their common salvation, and had decided that, this commonsense being what he esteemed it, Marian was a woman more likely to be won by a Fabian campaign than by a Varric attack.

The point wherein these calculations erred was their underestimation of the momentum of a girlish impulse. That method of consideration which makes one slow to reach convictions works beyond the convictions and retards one from action upon them, once they are achieved, but the impulsive mind that bolts a creed unmasticated straightway drives its owner, in the creed's behalf, to the thumbscrews or the wrack. It is from the pods of half-baked opinions that there is shaken the seed of the church: Marian meant to keep to her purpose.

Perhaps Wesley's silence and the subtle sense of pique that it awakened played a part in this; perhaps the purpose was self-sufficient; but, in either case, Marian missed scarcely an evening at the settlement. Two of her former classmates were knee-deep in the work there, and what she saw and what they told her served only to confirm her. It thus happened that, anxious again to see him alone, and more anxious to let him know the endurance of her resolution, she had, on this evening, telephoned on the chance of finding him late at his office.

"Good heavens!" he gasped as she met him at the settlement's door. "What on earth are you doing in this part of town at this hour of the night? Let me 'phone for a taxi."

What, as a matter of fact, she had been doing was to listen to slim little Luigi Malatesta and fat little Morris Binderwitz respectively attacking and defending the proposition that Abraham Lincoln was a greater American than George Washington; but what she thought she had been doing was assisting in raising the lower half of society. Under this impression, her fine brown eyes shone with the consciousness of moral rectitude, her mouth was even more than usually firm, and her head even more than usually like some delicate cameo.

"One thing at a time, please," she imperturbably answered. "First, no taxicab. It isn't far to Second Avenue, which is quiet enough, and I want to walk for a few blocks."

She took the arm that he grimly offered, and he began to break his way through the noisy crowd under the flaring gasoline lamps of the push-carts. Coherent conversation was at first impossible, but Dyker felt a glow of pride as, with her fingers closed in tight trust upon him, he shouldered a passage for her, and Marian herself was not insusceptible to the thrill inherent in the situation. Nevertheless, the girl, as soon as they had turned northward, reverted to her former attitude; and the man, knowing well that all this meant that she was still determined upon a course necessarily delaying his wooing and perhaps resulting in his discovery, frankly resumed his opposition. He did more and worse: he swept aside all his method of silence, all his plans of conquest through non-resistance.

"Now," he said, continuing their interrupted talk, "I should really like to know what you, of all people in the world, were doing on Rivington Street."

"I was there," she announced serenely, "because I have made up my mind that it is I, of all people in the world, who ought to be there."

"Marian,"—he almost stopped as he said it—"are you really in earnest about this fancy? Do you honestly mean that you are seriously considering any such chimerical course?"

He had, naturally, chosen precisely the tone that, were any additional incentive required, would have compelled her to resolution. Her mind, as it chanced, was, however, made up, and what he now said served only to turn her toward that feminine logic which assumes as done that which is determined.

"I am past consideration," she said. "I have already virtually begun."

"Marian! You're joking."

"I am simply stating a fact. Why do you suppose I have been staying in town this summer? I begin my real work at the settlement with the first of next week."

Her classmates in Rivington Street, could they have heard this, would have been pleased, but they would also have been surprised. Nevertheless, she at once mentally decided to make good her declaration.

In the darkness Dyker bit the lip that, under his short, crisp mustache, trembled with vexation.

"You really mean that?"

She bowed a brief assent.

"Then what, if you please, do you propose to do when you get there?"

As to that Marian found herself suddenly certain.

"You ought to know," she said, "how these people are living; you ought to know how the girls—hundreds and hundreds of them—are every week going into lives of shame and death. I mean to do what I can to stop them."

It would have been a hard thing for her to say to him had he not wrought upon her anger, and had not the freshness of her partial glimpse of earth's lower seven-eighths fired her heart with a blind inspiration. She had the partial vision that makes the martyr: a vision that shows just enough of an evil to confirm the necessity of action and not enough to prove how little individual action individually directed can be worth.

For the second time Wesley gasped. Here were depths in her of which he had not dreamed, and because he had not dreamed of them he would not admit them.

"But you can't!" he protested. "It is impossible that you should. It's inconceivable that a woman of your delicacy should go into such coarse work!"

"Is it better that it should be left to coarse women? It seems to me that there has been enough of coarseness in it already."

"But this—why, it's something that one can't even speak about!"

"Yes, something that we are not permitted even to mention, Wesley; and because we aren't permitted even to mention it, the thing grows and grows, night by night. It thrives in the shadow of our silence. They tell me that the liquor laws are broken, because nobody will mention it; that bestial men get rich in it, because nobody will mention it; that in this city alone there are three hundred saloon dance-halls intended to furnish its supply, because nobody will mention it!"

Figuratively, Dyker threw up his hands in horror, but actually, like all desperate men, he seized at the straws of detail.

"Now, that just shows how wrong your view of the whole subject happens to be," he declared. "My work has put me in a position to know something about these dance-halls, and I know that they exist simply because the girls that go to them want them to exist—the girls, mark you; not the men. Why, the girls aren't taken to such places; they go of themselves, they pay their own admission, and it is the usual thing for a girl earning six dollars a week in a store to save fifty cents out of every salary-envelope for the dance-halls."

"Then you want me to conclude that the fact that they want to do the thing makes the thing right?"

"You don't understand——"

"Precisely; and so I mean to learn."

"You can't learn. No matter how closely you study this whole matter, you can't learn, Marian. How can a clean-hearted, clean-lived American girl ever get the point of view of these low-down, low-browed foreigners? It's the sort of thing they're used to."

"Before they begin it?"

"It's the survival of the fittest."

"Then can't some be made more fit to survive?"

"It's the law of life, and it can't be stopped."

"So was negro slavery the law of life. It couldn't be stopped either—until we stopped it."

"That is all theory, Marian; it won't work out in practice. The great point is that these unfortunate women, whether they become unfortunate through the dance-halls or anywhere else, are simply not our sort of clay: they're not Americans."

"They are human beings."

"A pretty low example."

"And they are more Americans than your ancestors or mine were three hundred years ago."

"Nonsense. They're different, I tell you—different. Seriously, I know what I am talking about: I speak from systematic investigations, reports, statistics. The very latest investigation shows that all but about thirteen per cent. of these women were either born abroad or else are the children of foreign parents. It is always the newest immigrants that swell the ranks, and of course the newest immigrants are our lowest type."

"I don't see that all this alters the question."

"Well, it does."

"The lower they are, the more plainly it is our duty to raise them."

"My dear Marian, how can you raise them when you don't understand them?"

Marian shook her handsome head.

"You will come back to that," she said; "and all that I can answer is that, not being utterly stupid, and having come to understand a few abstract problems, I have hopes of mastering something so close at hand to me and so concrete as a fellow human being."

"What, for instance?" asked Wesley, "can you understand of the typical Jewish girl of the East Side?"

"A good deal, I think. They were talking about that type at the settlement this evening. We were looking from the front windows at an endless stream of Jewish girls tramping home from the factories where they worked to the tenements where they slept. Somebody said there are nearly four hundred thousand Jews living east of the Bowery; that in most Jewish families the ambition to which every comfort must be sacrificed is the education of the boys; that for this reason the girls must work and are worked until there is nowhere else in the world where so much labor is got out of young women, and yet that the Jewess that is not married and a mother before she is twenty is regarded as a family disgrace. It seems to me, Wesley, that the case of those girls is pretty easy to understand. It seems to me that they are on the horns of a rather ugly dilemma."

Dyker's cane whipped the air as if it were striking at the heads of opposing arguments.

"You accept as gospel," he said, "everything that is told you by anybody but me. It isn't a pleasant subject, but, if you insist upon facts, let me tell you that there are troops of Jewesses who come down here from the upper Ghetto and walk the streets for no other purpose than to get money for their wedding trousseaus."

It was a blow at her conventions, and she shuddered; but she stood by her guns. They had crossed down Twenty-sixth Street now and they turned into the quiet of Madison Avenue, among comfortable houses and silent churches, as she answered.

"If they do that," she said, "it is because they have to."

"Have to? Why on earth should they have to?"

"I don't know, but I know that the very use they make of the money shows what they do is only a means and not an end."

"Are trousseaus so necessary that these girls have to sell their souls for them?"

"Souls have been sold for less. Even you and I make considerable sacrifices for things that other people in other classes would not think needful at all."

He had done his best to bridle his annoyance, but now he could bridle it no longer. He was wholly sincere in his inability to take seriously either the girl or her point of view, and now, though he felt as if he were riding a hunter at a butterfly, he charged blindly.

"Oh, please don't let us jump at sentiment and theory," he remonstrated; "let us keep our feet on figures and fact. The figures grow with the population; they always have so grown and they always will so grow. And the plain fact is that, though a few good people have been trying to stop this thing for four thousand years, they have never succeeded in doing anything but soiling themselves in the attempt."

"I know that," she frankly acknowledged, "and I don't know what it is that's to blame; but I know that there isn't any evil that hasn't some cure if we can only find it out."

"Then why not leave the search for a cure to the experienced?"

"I shall; but I propose to become one of the experienced. I mean to give my time, at least for a while, to first-hand study. Perhaps then I shall learn enough to know that it's useless for me to go on, but I shall keep trying to go on until I am convinced that there isn't any use in the trying."

"That's absurd, Marian—simply absurd. The condition is, after all, one that must be dealt with by the law, and I tell you honestly that, as yet, even the law is helpless."

"Has the law really tried? Has it ever attempted, for instance, to do anything to the men that take these immigrant girls at the dock and make slaves of them?"

"Yes, it has; it has tried just that. In Chicago two men were arrested for taking a couple of such girls—they had brought them from New York—and when the case was appealed, the United States Supreme Court found that, though importation of girls was a violation of federal law, yet the federal law providing a punishment for merely harboring such girls after their arrival was unconstitutional."

Marian's voice faltered.

"Is—is that true?" she asked.

"Absolutely," said Dyker. Like most lawyers of his generation, his ideas of what was right were limited only by the final decisions of what was legal, and if the Supreme Court of the United States had, by even a majority of one, declared that the sun moved around the earth, Dyker would have first denied and then forgotten all previous astronomy.

"Absolutely," he repeated, and awaited her capitulation.

But Marian did not capitulate. She merely drew a long breath and answered:

"After all, that, of course, is just a small portion of the big question, and the only way it moves me is to lessen my opinion of the Supreme Court."

It was Wesley's turn to gasp, and he did so. He had always suspected that these college-settlements were hotbeds of Socialism and Anarchy—two theories that, to Dyker, were one and the same—and now he had his confirmation.

He was too cynically wrong upon one side of their subject to realize how emotionally wrong she, in her hope of accomplishment through personal appeal, might be upon the other. But here was a concrete denial of his one sincere conviction, and, though he was at last calm enough to see that he must not allow this conviction to wreck his suit, he was not so calm as to maintain a clear judgment. It was plain that Marian would not be turned from her experiment. His best course was, he then reasoned, immediately to put on record his opinion of its futility, even to quarrel with her in defense of that opinion, and then, when experience brought the awakening upon which his own worldly experience counted, to stand ready to profit by the inevitable reaction that would most likely show the perfidy of the women whom Marian hoped to help, detract from the credibility of any gossip they might recount concerning him, and end by winning him his wife.

"All right," he said sharply, "it is perfectly useless to talk reasonably to anybody that can take such a view of so simple a matter. Here is Thirty-fourth Street. I think we had better walk over to Broadway and get that taxi."

The worst thing that a man can impute to a handsome woman is a lack of intellect. Marian's cheeks flushed.

"I quite agree with you," she replied. "I am utterly incapable of arguing with anybody that so confuses law and justice."

"Very well," said Dyker; "but I want you to remember what I have said upon the subject as a whole. When you have trusted these women and been betrayed by them, when they have poisoned your mind against all the principles you have been brought up to believe, when you have left the world of sentiment and bruised your poor hands with hammering at the door of fact, then you will acknowledge that I have been right. I am not angry——"

"Oh, of course not!"

"I am not angry, but I am firm. I only ask you to believe that I shall never be far away from the settlement, and that you have only to telephone for me when you have need of me."

Marian compressed her lips to a more severe firmness, and the ride from Thirty-fourth Street to Riverside Drive was made in silence; but the following Monday found her, against all parental protests, enlisted as a settlement-worker in Rivington Street.

XV IMPARTIAL JUSTICE

Michael M. O'Malley, political boss, held his court, that next morning, in the back room of Ludwig Schleger's saloon on Second Avenue, and, because it was to be a busy day and there were many pleas to be made and many petitions to be received, he came early to his post.

As he swung majestically up the street toward his destination, his carefully pressed light gray suit flapping in the warm breeze about a figure so tall and so thin that any suit approaching "a fit" would have achieved only a caricature, his progress was almost regal. Pedestrians stepped to one side as if the bulk of his unseen dignity demanded a far wider strip of the paved channel than was required by his visible physique. Workingmen touched their grimy caps, the overseers of the street-repairing gangs bowed respectfully, children on their way to school bobbed their heads, and, at a corner, Officer Riley, concluding a substitute week "on the day turn," offered his best military salute. The keeper of every news-stand received a nod; the bootblacks outside of each saloon were given a brief word of greeting; there was not a beggar but got some largess, and of the several men that hurried up with a request, hinted or expressed, all were permitted to walk a few steps in the august presence, all received a brief, civil phrase of agreement, postponement, or consideration.

"Trouble about your place?" It was thus that O'Malley interrupted the voluble plea of a saloon-keeper that approached him. "I'll have that cop, Conners, looked into. His eyes are too new; they see more'n they're paid to see. Who's tendin' day-bar for you? Johnny Mager? All right, if they take the thing up front, I'll see that you get your license transferred in his name. Keep your shirt on an' leave it to me."

He had not paused in his walk; he had not raised his quiet voice or quickened his slow speech; but the suppliant retired satisfied, reassured.

Indeed, O'Malley's face was one that, if it would not inspire confidence in a stranger unacquainted with the man's reputation for guarding the interests of his dependents, at least bore the unmistakable stamp of that knowledge of life which is power. It was sallow and long, with a long thin nose and long thin lips, and cold eyes that thrust as swiftly and as deeply as the stilettos of Mr. O'Malley's Italian constituents. He smiled often and his smile was bitter; he spoke little and his words were short; but his servants had early learned that he was as sure to keep his promise as he was ready to give it, and that, so long as his tasks were well done, he was an indulgent master.

He entered "Schleger's place" with the air of an owner, nodded to the white-jacketed man behind the polished counter and before the polished mirror, and gave a quick, firm pressure to the plump, outstretched hand of the fat and grinning proprietor.

"All well with the family?" he asked, smiling his wry smile.

Ludwig Schleger beamed assent.

"Anything doing last night?"

"Nothin'," replied Ludwig. "'Ceptin' Mr. Dyker called you on the telephone. Wouldn't say what he wanted."

"I know that. Haven't had any more roughhousing?"

"No," grinned Schleger, wisely; "the boys are all got wise that they can't meddle with my new night-man."

"I see. Name's Hermann Hoffmann, ain't it?"

"That's right."

"Hum. Well, he may be useful. You must get him to move into this precinct, or else register him from here. Votes right, of course?"

"I ain't asked him yet."

"Do it to-night."

O'Malley walked to the dimly lighted back-room, hung with racing prints and framed lithographs advertising a wide variety of whiskeys. He drew a wicker-bottomed chair to a stained round table, and sat down.

The proprietor brought him a glass and a syphon of seltzer—the boss's only drink—and disappeared. The bar-keeper came with a handful of black cigars for which O'Malley paid with a bill, refusing the change, and also disappeared. Then the door of communication was shut and guarded, admission being denied to all persons not properly accredited, and the quiet, thin man in the light gray suit, now sipping his seltzer, now reflectively adjusting his bright blue tie, which bore a brilliant diamond pin, and always slowly smoking, began his conference with such callers as he had granted appointments.

They came in force—alone and in groups—all manner of men by the main entrance and a woman or two ushered through a side door. This one was promised a reward for duty to be done, that one assigned to the performance of a delicate piece of diplomacy. Now and then a short, sharp, cold reprimand for negligence or failure sent away a caller whipped, penitent, trembling; and here and there release was promised for a wayward son sent to "The Island," or a line of credit written for use at a grocer's shop.

Wesley Dyker came early. He paused at the bar for a drink to stiffen his courage, lingered a little longer until a predecessor had been dismissed, and then, his lids lowered, entered, alone, with a succinct account of Rose's attempt to play a double game.

When he had finished the narrative, O'Malley sat for a while gazing unconcernedly at the blackened ceiling, and smoking quietly.

"Well?" he said at last, and turned the sharp thrust of his gaze upon his caller.

Dyker, who was sitting opposite and who had been served with a drink of whiskey, tossed off the liquor in order to gain time to muster an answer for this unexpected query.

"Well," he at length replied, annoyed at thus being put into a position where he must make his proposition in the form of a request, "are you going to stand for that sort of thing?"

"I dunno."

"I wouldn't stand for it," said Dyker.

"If you had my job you might have to."

There was another pause. The long fingers of O'Malley tapped gently on the table. Dyker shifted uneasily in his seat.

"I wouldn't stand for it a minute!" he at last broke forth. "And what's more, you can have her up for something worse than the disorderly-house charge. She has one kidnapped girl in her house now, and I've got another that escaped from her, and who's ready to testify."

An instant later he was sorry that he had spoken so readily.

O'Malley tilted back against the wall until the front legs of his chair rose six inches from the floor. He blew an easy ring of smoke.

"You seem to have come here with your case all prepared," he remarked.

Wesley flushed and stammered.

"You see," he began, "I mean that I got hot at this, and I said to myself that it was only right to let you know this woman wasn't to be depended upon."

The forward legs of O'Malley's chair came down with a loud thump. Wesley started, but the boss only impaled him with another cold glance.

"See here," said he, "before we can do business we'd better altogether understand each other. Just what is it you want?"

"I—I think I've made that clear."

"I think not."

"I want this Légère woman pinched for running a white-slave place. I want to see her taught a lesson that the other women down her way will profit by."

"Of course you do. But what do you want for yourself?"

The issue was too conclusively joined to permit of further evasion. Wesley took his courage in his hands.

"Why, I've not made any secret of that," he said, "and neither has headquarters. I want the next election for magistrate. I told you that long ago."

He launched his declaration with the bravado of weakness at bay, and then breathlessly awaited the answer.

Michael O'Malley leaned back again in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and closed his keen eyes, reflecting.

His was an hereditary office, but, unlike most men that inherit power, he had inherited also the abilities that had gained the power. His father, who had begun life as a policeman, had been a great exemplar of the political uses of an element fully realized only by the expert politician: the human element. The name of O'Malley had now for a generation been, south of Fourteenth Street, a magic title. To a legion of men, women, and children, it stood for a sort of substitute, and very near and practical, Providence. It implied contact, fellow-feeling, the personal relation. Acting upon the politician's axiom that whatever is acquired is right, the elder O'Malley had risen from the street force until, after zealous party-work, he had been promoted, in the palmy days of policy and the pool-rooms, to the "Gambling Squad," where he had performed the astounding financial feat of saving eight times his monthly salary, had retired, and grown annually richer and stronger through politics, without once losing the esteem of his voting underlings, or once seeming to cease being one of them. Since his father's death, now that gambling had declined and prostitution had risen as political material, Michael, who had been brought up to the business, had filled the place of that genuinely mourned parent. Without any publicly acknowledged means of support, even with no headquarters save the daily shifted back-rooms of saloons, he had extended and increased the power and the fortune that had been left to him. He was known as the friend of the distressed; he was recognized as benefiting with his left hand the poor whom he unimpededly robbed with his right. To those who were without money or without assistance he was always accessible. He made festival with the merry and was readily sympathetic with them that mourned. By small gifts at all times and large gifts in days of emergency, by acting as the adviser, the employment-agent, the defender, from the law, of the people whom he exploited and upon whose weaknesses and vices he throve, he won and held fast both the tribute and the allegiance of the vicious and the weak.

It was a mighty position and yet one that, in moments like the present, was inherently delicate, one in which the fortunate man must move warily lest in gaining a new friend he lose an old. It is all very well to be temperate and profit by drunkenness, to be abstemious and take money from prostitution; it is easy to give presents at Christmas and picnics in summer when the giving is in reality only paying a small rebate to wives for drunken husbands, to mothers for daughters stolen. It is easy to find a place in the municipal government for the man that stuffs a ballot-box for you, or the procurer that registers your fraudulent votes from the houses of his customers; but it is fatal to punish, for what may be a passing disloyalty, anyone that your world, perhaps ignorant that offense has been committed, regards as having been placed by a careless Heaven under your protecting wing,—fatal, that is to say, unless you acquire something more than you throw away.

Of all this, though scarcely with such frankness of phrase, Michael O'Malley made thought before he gave Dyker the reply for which that clever young lawyer was waiting. Behind his closed eyes he weighed the chances carefully: the things to be gained against the things that might be lost.

Then he thoughtfully lit another black cigar.

"You've got to keep out of personal relations with these women," he yawned.

Dyker bit his lip.

"I don't have them," he replied.

"Yes, you do. Cut 'em out. Understand?"

Surprisedly, angrily, Dyker found himself bowing obedience, like a school-urchin detected in some breach of academic discipline.

"A woman with a past," continued O'Malley, "is all right for the present, but a slow mare in the futurity."

"I dare say you're correct," said Wesley Dyker. With a single blow of the whip, the master had demonstrated his mastery.

O'Malley smoked a while longer in silence.

"Now then," he at last pursued, "about this magistracy. You think the boys'll stand for you?"

"I think they will," Wesley replied, with humble mien, but rising assurance. "And I think it ought to make the ticket look better to the uptown people to have—if you will pardon my saying so—my sort of name on it."

O'Malley grunted.

"Don't you worry about the looks of the ticket, or the value of your sort of a name," he said. "The kid-glove game is played out; it's only the monkey who's always hopping about on his family-tree."

Dyker's courage ebbed again, but he knew that to stand upon his dignity was to be overthrown.

"At all events," he persisted, "I am pretty well known hereabouts by this time, and I think honestly that I am pretty well liked."

O'Malley nodded. He knew more about that than Dyker knew. Dyker had, with more or less direct assistance from O'Malley's own headquarters, already won some prominence for himself, and had been of some use to the organization, in that sort of legal-practice which is a highly specialized branch of the profession on the lower East Side. The purpose of that branch is simply the protection of the criminal, especially the criminal engaged in the procuring or confining of slave-girls, but its methods, far from being unusual, are merely a daring extension of the methods that, within the last decade, have increased in popularity among the seemingly more respectable practitioners. Evidence is manufactured or destroyed, according to immediate needs; favorable witnesses are taught favorable testimony; postponements are secured until a politically indebted judge is on the bench. There follows a formal bellowing against what are called invasions of inalienable personal rights, and then there comes a matter-of-course acquittal. With Dyker's ability in this sort of work O'Malley was thoroughly familiar; for this man's party-services he was sufficiently grateful, and with the chance of the lawyer's rise to a popularity that would be of still further help he was well satisfied.

"If you'd be elected," he at length reflectively remarked, "you'd have a mighty responsible position, Dyker."

"I know that."

"There would be a good many ways"—O'Malley knocked, with great deliberation, the ash from his cigar—"a good many ways in which you could help the party—if you'd be elected."

He seemed to be discussing, disinterestedly, a purely abstract question; but Dyker did not miss his meaning.

"I shouldn't overlook them," he said.

"And, if you'd be elected, there'd be a lot of ways in which you might hurt—the party."

"I scarcely think you have any just cause for apprehension upon that score, Mr. O'Malley. I think that my record speaks for itself. My record is regular; it is an open book to the whole city——"

"Never mind that, Dyker; it's an open book to me, anyhow."

"I'm aware of it; but then——"

"All I want to know is two things."

"And they are, Mr. O'Malley?"

"First, are you the kind that lose their head over a good thing and land in jail?"

"Does my law-practice seem to indicate that I should be likely to overstep legal limits?"

"No, I guess it don't. But you can't always tell; we can't afford no hogs; and that sort of a man gives all his friends a black eye."

"But I say to you——"

"And next, I want to know, Mr. Dyker, whether you're the kind of a man that don't forget them that put him where he's at."

The low, slow spoken sentence ended with a sudden click of Mr. O'Malley's long, vulpine jaws. He leaned quickly forward across the table and fixed Wesley with the stiletto of his eyes.

Dyker met that gaze steadily. He leaned, in his turn, toward O'Malley, and his own voice dropped to a whisper. There was an exchange of a dozen sentences, and the two men had arrived at a perfect understanding: Dyker was as good as elected.

O'Malley pressed the call-button.

"Billy," he said to the bar-keeper, "have somebody run out and bring in Larry Riley off his beat. I want to see him."

As the bar-keeper nodded and disappeared, Dyker started to rise.

"I don't know whether Riley had better see me here," he said. "Rose's house is on his regular beat."

"All the more reason to sit tight," replied the comprehending O'Malley. "What's the use of gettin' square with a person unless the person knows who done it?"

"But I am not sure that Riley would be a safe man to confide this to. He's naturally a friend of Rose's."

"He's more of a friend of mine."

The officer entered a minute later, his flushed face gravely attentive, his helmet in his hand.

"Riley," said O'Malley, "you know this Légère woman."

"I do that, Mr. O'Malley, sir."

"Well, she's been gettin' too gay. When you go off duty, you tell Jim to have her place pinched to-night."

Riley's cheeks became a shade less red.

"It's sorry I am to hear, sir, that she's been misbehavin' of herself," he murmured.

"Sure you're sorry. Tell Jim to get there early: we don't want nobody but the women."

"What"—Riley wet his dry lips—"What's the charge?"

"Runnin' a white-slave joint. You're to be sure to get a girl she has in the third floor back."

O'Malley's tone had been conclusive; it indicated that the interview was at an end; but the big officer stood twirling his helmet between his large hands.

"Mr. O'Malley, sir?" he began.

"What is it, Riley?"

"There's nothin' else?"

"Nuthin'."

"An'—there ain't no other way out of it for Mrs. Légère?"

"No, there ain't. But you can report her house and get the credit yourself, Riley."

"Thank ye kindly, sir; but if ye don't mind, sir, I think I'd rather let someone get it as nades it more. Ye see, Mr. O'Malley, sir, this here Mrs. Légère has been powerful kind to me, an'——"

"All right, have it your own way."

"I—I can't do nothin' for her, Mr. O'Malley?"

"Not this time. That's all, Riley.—And, Riley——"

The thin boss stood up and crossed to the bulky policeman. His voice was still low and soft.

"Yis, Mr. O'Malley?"

"If that woman gets wind of this an' makes a getaway, I'll have your uniform off you so God damned quick you'll wish I'd skinned you alive."

"Yis, Mr. O'Malley, sir," said the officer. "No fear of that, sir."

But he left the audience-chamber with a heavy heart. He lived the life that he was compelled to live, and he did what he was ordered to do, but he could not without compunction turn upon one that had bought a right to his own and his superior's protection.

There was not a little silent bitterness in his heart as, later, returning to the station-house, he thought upon these things. He remembered the days when he had been new upon the force. Those were the days when the popular tide had turned against gambling and, amid the raids that meant the breaking of steel doors, the pursuit of offenders through secret passages and across steep roofs, it was for a while possible for a policeman to retain his ideals. But he remembered also how, when the ruling powers had thus been forced to destroy the nests where once they had gathered golden eggs, the long arm of necessity swung slowly backward until it paused at the point where it had since remained and, because the eggs must be gathered somewhere, the police were expected to gather them from the aeries of the vultures that preyed upon women.

Riley had not minded, every pay-day, handing over to the appointed heeler the five dollars wherefor he received a receipt for a dollar and a half as dues to the political club to which he was expected to belong. For quite some time he had been content with closing his eyes to saloons that were opened on Sundays by proprietors that were powerful, and with allowing others to profit by the rewards of his voluntary blindness. But at last there came the first baby in the Riley home, and then the second, and the wife's long illness; and then assessments were increased and, finally, after many a broad hint from the men higher up, he was given plainly to understand that he must either hand over a goodly portion of money, every week, from the offending women on his beat, or else lose his usefulness to the force.

After that, he took what he must and kept what he could. He had no trade on which to fall back; his domestic and political expenses grew annually, and, as an evasion of the former meant financial ruin, so the shirking of the latter meant a charge lodged at headquarters, a speedy hearing, and an automatic dismissal. Even when a non-partisan man was put at the head of the department, that official's practical power was nullified by the fact that the mayor, a party-man, was behind him and could remove him at a moment's notice, and that behind the mayor was the organization that had made and could break the mayor. No individual, so far as Officer Riley could see, was personally to blame, was himself a free agent; but the whole collection of individuals were the irresponsible parts of a gigantic machine—from the inner council of Tammany to their spies in every municipal department—which, if ever broken by the recognized party of opposition, must be so thoroughly rebuilt and so precisely operated in accordance with mechanical lines that the change would signify only the casting out of the irresponsible parts and their replacement by parts equally irresponsible. Riley could look no farther, and, even could he have seen that the remedy must be a remedy of conditions, he could have done nothing to free himself.

At the station-house he delivered the commands that O'Malley had given him. There his words produced consternation, but no thought of disaffection. The patrol-wagon was ordered to be in its stable, ready to leave at the given hour, and Riley, as the officer regularly assigned to night-work on the beat in which stood Rose's house, was forced to remain to accompany it.

"An' see here, you men,"—these were the words with which the brief instructions were concluded—"you see to it nobody gets ahead of you. This is O'Malley's job, an' it's got to be done right."

In the underworld of every city, news, however, travels even while it is in the making, and in no direction does it travel more swiftly, just as in no other does it travel more indirectly, than, when the slave-trade is concerned, it travels to the traders. Riley was careful to remain in full view of the sergeant's desk from the moment the arrangements were made until the time of execution—he would not have dared to communicate with the friends that had thus swiftly become the enemy—none of the wagon-crew were seen to leave the stable, to use the telephone, or to speak to a passerby, and yet, shortly before the appointed time, through a certain club-room over a not far distant saloon—a club-room much affected by young men in Max Grossman's profession—there soon spread the definite tidings that Rosie Légère had just been "piped off."

The swarthy and brilliant Rafael Angelelli heard the word, and straightway, beyond all doubting, confirmed it. With the unheeded easy evening breeze tumbling his uncovered oily locks, he ran to the nearest booth-telephone, and hurriedly called Rose upon the wire.

"Eet ees comin'!" he whispered excitedly into the transmitter.

Rose's voice replied with stolid assurance.

"What's comin'?" she asked.

"Poliziotti—cops," replied the Italian, finding more and more difficulty with his English as his panic increased. "Eet ees Angel talkin'.—I jus' getta da nuova.—They maka da pinch!"

"Quit your kiddin'."

"Naw. Veraménte. Crêdi tu! Queeck!"

His fright hit the mark.

"How'd it happen?" demanded Rose. "Who's back of it?"

"Dees Meest' Dyker."

"You fool Dago"—her voice grew shrill with fear and anger—"can't you do nothin'?"

"Naw. 'E's been to O'Malley."

"You're a hell of a help! How about Riley an' the rest?"

"Naw. O'Malley maka them do thees."

"It's that slut Violet, that's who it is! That's gratitude for you. I've been half expectin' trouble since she got loose last night.—How long have I?"

"I don' know. Maybe five min'; maybe one."

"My Gawd!"

"Don' hang up! Leesten: firs' t'eeng you do getta da new girl out. Eef they getta dees new girl you go——"

But there came a quick click from the other end of the wire. Rose had ended the conversation.

Angel, still hatless, hurried through the few intervening streets and darted into that street to which he had just been speaking.

Already the early New York twilight had descended, and the block seemed, at first glance, to have turned to slumber. One distant, spluttering arc-light succeeded only in accentuating the gloom. From the patch of darkening sky into which the roofs blended, a bare handful of pale stars twinkled weakly, and on both sides, from corner to corner, the uniform, narrow houses rose in somber repetition, each with its brief, abrupt flight of steps, each with its shuttered windows, each silent behind its mask.

All this the Italian saw with accustomed eyes, and then he darted into the shadow of an areaway, because he saw also that, brief as had been his journey, Riley had arrived before him.

In a little knot of wise children, a patrol wagon, its sophisticated horses unconcernedly dozing, stood before Rose's house. An officer was in the doorway; hurried lights shifted from behind one bowed shutter to another, and gradually Angel became conscious that, all along the street, frightened faces were peeping from stealthily lifted blinds.

For quite some time the watcher waited. At last the big figure of Riley and a companion appeared in the open doorway and spoke to someone in the wagon. Through the evening quiet their voices came distinctly.

"Ready?" asked Riley.

"All ready," came the answer.

"We've got the madam an' the nigger, an' the four of thim, but I belave they must have turned the new girl loose before we got here."

This time the reply came from within the house, and it came in the tones of Rose, raised high in anger and in blasphemy:

"You're a dirty liar, Larry Riley! There never was another one, an' you know that as well as I do! Just you wait till I tell the judge what you do know, you damned, low, double-crossin' sneak! You bastard, you!"

Riley and his companions turned and ran into the vestibule.

"Just you wait," the cry continued. "Just you wait, you thief, you——"

The voice stopped as suddenly as it had started.

There was another pause, a longer one, and then Angel, bending as far as he dared from his hidden corner, saw the two officers come quickly out with their hands upon the arms of two cloaked women, whom they helped into the dark recesses of the patrol-wagon. They went back and returned with one more. A fourth followed; then a fifth, and a sixth. Two policemen appeared, evidently from positions that they had been guarding in the rear of the house. The man on the steps closed the door and locked it. All the policemen climbed to the wagon. The driver gathered up the reins. The tittering children scattered wildly. The horses woke up and started away at a brisk trot.

Impartial Justice was beginning her task.

XVI SANCTUARY

To leave the protection of Dyker and the kindly secrecy of the cab, and then to leap into a tide of alien human beings and swim against them in a strange and terrifying sea, had required the last grain of courage and strength that was left in Violet's sapped body and cowed soul. It was only by the momentum that Wesley's calm directions had given her, and quite without consciousness upon her own part that, with her cloak gripped tightly about her, she tottered forward, buffeted and shrinking, to the first corner, wheeled to the right into a street comfortingly darker, turned again into a still narrower and quieter way, and then came to an uncertain stop before what seemed to be no street at all, but only a small black rift among the beetling walls of brick.

Empty as was the way compared with Rivington Street, it was what, had she not seen the former thoroughfare, she would have considered oppressively full. Urchins walked hand in hand along the gutters, push-cart men cried their wares over the cobbles and, in the hot night, frowzy women crowded the house-steps. A clatter of voices, of foreign tongues and unfamiliar forms of English, rattled out the gossip of the neighborhood, and a few steps away, a belated hurdy-gurdy shook forth a popular tune.

Violet cowered against the nearest wall. She was uncertain as to how to proceed, and she was afraid to stand still. There seized her an unreasoned terror lest all this seeming escape might be some new trick leading into some new trap. A policeman passed with heavy tread, but, unmindful of Dyker's assurance, the girl drew, trembling, as far away from him as she could. Then, when her straining eyes saw him turn at the next corner to retrace his steps, she made sure that he was coming back to recapture her, and, now desperate, she faced a pair of solemn children slowly approaching from the opposite direction.

The six-year-old boy to whom she especially addressed herself shook an uncomprehending head, but his wiser companion, a very dirty little girl of seven, made proud answer.

"He don't to speak no English," she said. "He only can tell things out of Jewish. But I tells you. That there's your street right behind you. Yiss, ma'am. An' your house is by the two on that there side."

Violet's lips tried to form a word of thanks. She turned, as the girl had ordered, into the rift among the brick walls, found that, once it had traveled beyond the depth of the house before which she had been standing, it opened to a width of a few additional feet, and so, almost creeping through the Stygian passage in which shone only one far-away lamp, she felt her way to the second door.

It was partially open, and a jet of blue gas in the hallway burned overhead. She could see several doors in the shadows, but all were closed. She heard a dragging step coming down the stairs. She drew against the wall and waited.

The step was slow and uncertain. It seemed to consider well before each movement forward, but it had a character that reassured her. It was the same sort of step with which her father was wont to return home after his occasional carouses, and she knew that whoso walked in that fashion was, so long as one kept out of reach, not greatly to be feared. She remained hidden until the step drew nearer, until the dark bulk of the drunkard slowly massed itself out of the surrounding darkness, until it had brushed by her. Then she spoke.

"Can you tell me," she asked, "if there's a Miss Flanagan lives here?"

The passerby was not in a condition where voices from nowhere seemed remarkable. He stopped and, evidently not clear as to just whence this particular voice proceeded, addressed the air immediately before him.

"I can so," he said.

"Then will you, please?"

"Will I what?" responded the passerby, determined that the air should be more specific.

"Will you please tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"Is there a Miss Flanagan lives here?"

"There is that. There's three of her, an' wan of thim's a Missus. Good-night."

Awkwardly he touched his hat to the air and stumbled out into the alley.

Violet breathed hard. She had never in her life before been in a tenement-house; but she knew that now she must seek a door through which some ray of light gave hint of waking persons within and, knocking, of them inquire anew. Around her, all the doors were forbidding, so, timidly and with a hand tight upon the shaking rail, she softly climbed the decrepit stairs.

At the second floor a shaft of yellow light stopped her.

Here was a door that was open, and beyond it, by an uncovered deal table on which stood a rude kerosene lamp, sat two figures: the figure of an old woman, her gnarled hands clasped loosely in her aproned lap, her dim eyes gazing at the sightless window, and the figure of a young woman, her hands beneath her round chin, her wide eyes on a naked baby quietly sleeping in a clothes-basket at her knee. The floor was uncarpeted, the walls unadorned, the room almost bare of furniture; but on the face of her that looked into the past and in the face of her that looked into the future there was peace.

A quick stroke of pain stabbed the onlooker's heart, but she dragged herself ahead and, not to disturb the baby, spoke without knocking.

The old woman turned, and Violet noticed that the eyes which could see so far behind were blind and could see no step forward. The mother, however, spoke kindly and gave the directions that the girl needed; but Violet, wanting to say something about the baby in return, and, able only to murmur formal thanks, pursued her climb upward.

She found at last the door that she was certain must be Katie Flanagan's, but, when she had found it, all power of further motion suddenly ceased. Weakness, shame, and fear swept over her like a cloud of evil gases from an endangered mine, and she swayed against the panel before her.

Inside, Katie and the shirtwaist-maker, just ready for bed, heard the faint sound without and, opening the door, caught the almost fainting figure in their arms. The dark cloak dropped open, disclosing the crimson kimona beneath, and this, awakening Violet's one dominating passion—the terror of detection and consequent recapture—roused the fugitive a little. She staggered away from the assisting hands, wrapped the cloak tightly around her, and leaned, panting, against the wall.

"Miss—Miss Flanagan?" she gasped.

Katie nodded her black head.

"That's me," she said.

"I'm—I'm the—I'm Violet."

The Irish girl comprehended quickly. With Irish tact she refused, just then, to hear more; with Irish volubility she burst into exclamations of pity, and with ready Irish sympathy she took Violet in her strong arms.

"Put her on my cot," said Carrie, and they led her there.

They took away her cloak, for she was now too weak to protest, and, though they did pause in awe before the crimson kimona, they hurried to make their guest comfortable. The Lithuanian Jewess moved silently and swiftly about with that calm competence which characterizes her people, and Katie, fanning the white face and chafing the thin hands, continued to croon condolences.

"There now!" she at last smiled, as Violet's blue eyes opened. "Sure you're yourself again entirely. Don't say a word, not one word, an' just tell us whatever 'tis you might be wantin'."

"Whiskey," gasped Violet.

The girls looked at each other.

"That's all right," said the Jewess, quietly; "I can spare it"—and she handed Katie some small change.

The Irish girl flung a shawl over her head, and ran down the stairs. She went into the side door of the nearest saloon, entered a narrow compartment, passed the money through a hole in a partition, and was given a small flask partly filled. Within five minutes she had returned, and Violet, drinking the contents of the bottle at a single draught, began to revive.

"Are you hungry, darlin'?" asked Katie.

Violet shook her russet head.

"No," she answered, "I couldn't eat, thanks. I'm only just played out."

"Poor dear, you look it. But you're all right now, an' you can rest as long as you like. Don't you bother. Don't you worry. Don't you be afraid. You got away without any trouble, did you?"

"Yes," said Violet, and because she was still unable to frame her lips to adequate thanks, she gave them as much of the story of her escape as she could give without mention of the name of her rescuer, who had warned her that he must not be publicly known to figure in the case.

"A man?" echoed the cynical Katie. "An' he didn't ask nothin' in return?"

"No."

"He must be worth knowin', that man."

"He only wants me to go somewhere an' swear to all Rose done to me."

"Oh!"—Katie's tone showed that she could now account for the gentleman's generosity.—"Well, don't you do it."

But Violet could not follow her.

"Why not?" she asked.

"I don't know just why; but don't you do it."

"I promised," said Violet.

"Och, listen to the poor dear!" Katie appealed to her fellow-lodger. "I wonder is it long she thinks he'd be keepin' his word to her."

Her own word freshened the ever-abiding terror in the runaway's heart, but Violet said no more about it.

"Would you have much to swear to?" asked Carrie, seated on the foot of the cot.

"What do you mean?" Violet parried.

"She means, Violet——" began Katie.

The fugitive, in her new surroundings, shrank from the name.

"Don't! Don't call me that!" she said.

"Sure an' ain't it the name you gave me yourself?"

"I know, but I don't want to hear it ever again. Call me Mary; call me Mary——"

And there, face to face with a new danger, Violet came to a stop. Her captivity had taught her much of bestiality, but it had taught her besides only that some unknown, tremendous power hated her; that she was debased and must never, at whatever cost of further suffering to herself, permit her degradation to attach to her family; that she must escape, but that she must also wholly divorce herself from all that life had meant her to be. She had no thought of the future; she had only a realization of what had been and what was.

"Mary what?" asked Carrie.

"Mary Morton," lied Violet. Perhaps she had heard the name before; perhaps the easy alliteration brought it first to her mind. At all events, she reflected, one name was as good as another, so long as it was not her own.

"Would you have much to swear to?" Carrie was continuing. "Is it as bad as they say—there?"

Violet looked at the round, serious face before her.

"I don't know what they say," she replied; "but it's worse than anybody can say. There's a lot of it you can't say, because there's a lot of it there ain't no words ever been made up for. Just you pray God you won't ever have to find out how bad it is."

They looked at her and saw on her the marks of which she was not yet aware.

Katie bent over and swiftly kissed the fevered forehead under its tumbled russet hair.

"You poor woman," she said with unintended implication, "an' how many years did you have to stand it?"

"It wasn't years; it was—it was only weeks."

"What? An' they could get a grown woman like you?"

Violet tried to smile.

"How old do you think I am?" she asked.

Katie made what she considered a charitable reply.

"Twenty-five?"

"I'm not seventeen."

Katie began to busy herself about the room, and Carrie turned her head.

"Ah, well," said Katie, "you're tired out, an' it's 'most mornin'. We must all go to sleep now."

"I only put on long dresses in April," said Violet.

But Katie seemed not to hear her. She hurried the arrangements for the night.

"Sleep as long as you like in the morning," said Carrie; "and if you can wear any of our things, wear 'em. We have to get up early, but don't mind us."

The latter injunction was unnecessary. Though Violet had for some time been excited by her escape, that excitement had already given place to utter exhaustion. The lamp had scarcely been extinguished before, with throbbing head, she passed into a sleep that was almost coma, and the lamp that was burning when she opened her aching eyes was the lamp of midmorning.

She was alone and afraid to be alone. Her head seemed splitting. She saw the milk and rolls that Katie had set out for her on the oilcloth-covered table, but her stomach revolted at the thought of food, and her poisoned nerves cried out for alcohol. She got up and managed to pull on some of the clothes belonging to her two hostesses.

From her first glance at the mirror, she drew back in bewilderment. During all her imprisonment she had been used, through her gradual change, to compare her morning appearance with that of her fellow slaves; but now there was fresh in her mind the standard, not of those pale and worn, though often fat and hardened, convicts, but of the pair of healthy girls that had, the night before, sheltered her; and from that standard her very image in the glass seemed to withdraw in horror. Lacking rouge, her cheeks, once so pink and firm, were pasty and pendant; her lips hung loose, her blue eyes were dull and blurred; even her hair appeared colorless and brittle. Little lines had formed at the corners of her eyes; her skin seemed rough and cracked, and other lines were already faintly showing from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth.

She sat down on the cot, sick and shivering. When she noticed a small pile of bedding in the corner behind the gas-stove, she shook at the memory of another such pile on another terrible morning, and by the time she had realized that one of her friends must have slept there in order to provide an extra couch, she was too wracked by suffering, physical and mental, to feel, at once, any great gratitude. The fever throbbed in her wrists, beat in her heart, hammered in her brain. She did not dare go to the street for whiskey or medicine. At every sound on the stairs she started up in the assurance that her keepers had come to recover her, and when, in the early afternoon, a loud knocking sounded on the door, she fell, in unresponding silence, before Katie's flaring lithograph of Our Lady of the Rosary.

"Hello in there!" called a not overcautious voice. "I want to talk to Miss Violet!"

Violet raised her clasped hands to the printed face before her.

"Don't let them take me!" she whispered in a prayer to that visible sign of a power she had never before addressed. "Don't let them take me!"

"Open up, can't you?" the voice insisted. "I know there's somebody inside, an', honest, I'm not going to hurt you!"

Violet's hands fell. The voice, she realized, was at least unfamiliar.

"Come on," it wheedled. "I'm all right; I'm from Mr. Dyker."

"What do you want?" she inquired.

"He said Miss Violet would know," came the answer. "He said I would be expected—that it'd be all right if I just told you I came from him."

Violet had not forgotten Katie's warning, but she was unable wholly to doubt the one man that had befriended her. She opened the door.

The pink-and-white young clerk that entered was much embarrassed, and his hostess, in her fever, did not ease him. Nevertheless, after many hesitations on his own part, and more repetitions and explanations made necessary by Violet, he at last convinced her that he did indeed come from Wesley Dyker, and that there was waiting around the corner the cab that would convey her to an office where she could begin the redemption of her pledge.

Almost in a dream, and too ill now much to care what happened to her, she followed the messenger. Dazedly she greeted Dyker in the cab; confusedly she left that conveyance for an office where she answered interminable questions put to her by another young man who, she was told, was an Assistant District Attorney; vaguely she heard Dyker assure this official, as she affixed a signature to an offered paper, that Wesley would himself guarantee her appearance whenever it was required, and when she was at last wheeled back and had climbed the stairs and, alone, fallen again upon Carrie's cot, the only one of recent facts concerning which she was at all certain was that she had said she was a native of Pittsburgh and that her name was Mary Morton.

Katie and Carrie, returning together, found her flushed and babbling nonsense. When they approached her, she did not recognize them, and then, for an hour, they could get from her only the monotonous repetition:

"Don't let them get me! Don't tell them my name!"

It was eight o'clock before the patient, quieted by sympathy and stimulated by whiskey, could be taken to the nearest drugstore, and there, as soon as the experienced druggist set eyes on her, he refused to prescribe.

He beckoned Katie to a corner.

"That girl's got to go to a hospital," he said; "and if I was you, I wouldn't lose much time in getting her there."

Katie the competent lost none. After another drink to stifle possible protest, Violet was taken upon a car to Sixteenth Street, and was then walked quickly westward. During all the way she did not speak, and, when she reached the hospital's fortunately empty receiving-ward, she was nearly unconscious.

A white-capped nurse received the little party, the young doctor, in shirt-sleeves and duck trousers, hovering in the background among the glass shelves agleam with instruments of polished steel.

"What's the trouble?" asked the nurse.

"It's that that we've come to find out of you," answered Katie.

The nurse nodded to the doctor.

He came forward and made a quick examination.

"Bring this woman inside and put her on the table," he ordered. "And you girls, stop where you are."

Her head thrown back, her dry mouth wide, and her russet hair falling, the unresisting Violet was carried behind a door that shut smartly after her.

Too scared to speak, Katie and her companion stood outside. Five minutes passed. Then ten. After a quarter of an hour, the door reopened.

"What's this patient's name?" he asked.

"Mary Morton," said Carrie.

"Where does she live?"

Katie gave her own address, and the doctor, a pad of printed forms in hand, noted both the answers.

That done, he paused and bit his pencil.

"Married?" he asked quickly.

"Who?" parried Katie. "Me?"

"No; the patient."

"Well, now," began Katie, "I can't see as that's——"

But the calm voice of Carrie interrupted.

"She is married," she said.

The doctor pursed incredulous lips.

"Where's her husband?" he demanded.

Katie, who had caught the need of the moment, jumped into the breach.

"Where a lot of them are," she responded, "an' where as many more might as well be, for all the use they are to their poor wives."

"Where's that?"

"Faith, it's you, sir, ought to know: you're the man."

"Dead?"

"Run away."

"Not much later than yesterday, did he? Well, I must find her nearest relative or friend. Are you either?"

Katie's face lengthened.

"Och, doctor," she said, "you don't mean to—but it can't be that there's goin' to be a baby!"

The young interne grinned. Then, serious again, he answered:

"No, there is not. I only wish it was so simple. Where are her folks?"

"She's none in the world, an' no money. The hard truth is, doctor, that it's a charity-patient she'll have to be."

"That's all right; but are you her nearest friends?"

"Yes, doctor."

"That'll do, I guess. She's a nervous wreck—among other things. We've first of all got to get her round from that condition, and then I'll have to secure either her own or your permission, as her nearest friends, to do something more."

"More?" repeated Katie. "Ain't it bad enough as it is? What more do you mean to do to the poor—girl?"

"I don't mean to do anything myself, but this is a common enough kind of case around here to make me certain what the resident surgeon will do: he'll operate."

XVII "A NET BY THE WAYSIDE"

Hermann Hoffmann, passing one evening to the little clothes-press behind the bar in Ludwig Schleger's saloon, and putting on the canvas coat that was his badge of office, heard the voice of the proprietor calling his name, and turned to see that stout German-American beckoning him to enter the back-room where, a month before, O'Malley had held with Wesley Dyker that conference which had proved so disastrous to Rose Légère.

He walked through the open door, whistling his Teutonic melody. He had not that fear of his employer which most employees have of the man for whom they work. Schleger had proved himself lenient and good-natured, and Hermann, whose cheerful round face and easy smile did not interfere with the use of a knotted arm and a mighty fist, was quite aware that there was no complaint justly to be made against the manner in which he performed his alloted tasks.

"Hoffmann," said Schleger, smiling, "you're all right."

"Sure," grinned Hermann.

"Yes," pursued the proprietor, "I been thinkin' about you that you sure have made good."

"I'm glad you vas sadisfied, Schleger."

"I am satisfied; but I think you need a little more time off now an' then. I haven't got nothin' to do this evenin'. I'll take your place."

Hermann's eyes brightened with unaffected pleasure. It had not always been pleasant to work in the nights when Katie was all day busy in the shop.

"Thanks," he said.

"Yes," nodded Schleger, benignantly; "it will be like old times for me. You take a night off."

"Shall I start out righd avay?"

"Certainly.—Of course you understand I'll want you around here the day of the primaries."

Hermann nodded.

"And Hermann, there's somethin' else I've been meanin' to talk to you about, and kep' forgettin' till O'Malley reminded me of it again this afternoon."

Hoffmann, pulling off his white jacket, stopped with arms extended.

"O'Malley?" he said in a strained voice. "Vat's dot man got to do vith me?"

"Well, you know he don't miss no tricks nowheres, an' some time back I was tellin' him what a good man you was, an' he said we ought to get you a little more active for him. A fellow behind a bar can do a whole lot that way, you know,—an' make a good thing of it."

"I know," replied Hermann, ripping off the coat, "but I ain't no politician."

"Nobody said you was, but all the fellows help a little."

"Sure; only I don't."

"Why not? We want to do well for the slate this time. Wesley Dyker's on it; you know him; he's all right."

"I ain't no politician, Schleger."

This stolid attitude plainly began to puzzle the proprietor.

"Don't be a fool, Hoffmann," he said. "The boys all have their eye on you, an' O'Malley don't forget any of his friends."

"Schleger, I got my own friends, und I make my own friends. I don't vant nussing I don't earn from nobody."

"But that sort of thing won't look right," argued Schleger. "You see, you're registered from here—

"No I ain't, Schleger; I'm registered from my own blace."

"Well, I didn't know that; you didn't tell me, an' so I registered you from here."

Hoffmann's pink cheeks became red. He folded his coat neatly over his arm.

"Vatch here, Schleger," he began. "I ain't no politician. I don't care——"

But he bit his lip and mastered himself to silence.

The proprietor saw this and appreciated the self-control that it manifested. There had been a time when he had felt as Hermann felt now, and so he was not disposed to use harsh argument. He came close to Hoffmann and, still smiling, dropped his voice to a whisper.

"That's all right," he said, soothingly. "I guess I know how you look at it. Don't say that I said so, but we'll let the matter drop if you only lay low a little and keep quiet. You know the brewery's backin' me in this saloon, an' you know, with the brewery pushin' me all the time for its money, I couldn't run the place a month if I didn't keep the side-door open Sundays. Well, then, how could I keep the place workin' Sundays if it wasn't for O'Malley? Just try not to be openly again' him, that's all."

Hermann did not commit himself, but his tone had softened when, in reply, he asked:

"Und should I take to-night off?"

"Certainly you should. Go along now, an' ferget it."

He went, but as he walked down the avenue, "Die Wacht Am Rhein" issued from his lips to the time of a funeral-march.

His sole consolation lay in the fact that, in the recent glimpses he had secured of Katie, that young lady had begun to evince signs of relenting from her former attitude of celibacy. He knew that she had gradually ceased to descant upon the impossibility of his supporting a wife, and he thought that she was entertaining hopes of a promotion in the shop to a position where her own earnings, added to his, would make a comfortable living-wage for two.

What he did not know—and this for the excellent reason that Katie would not tell it to him—was that, whatever their prospects for the future, both Katie and her roommate were still engaged in that battle with poverty and temptation which had lessened scarcely one whit since its beginning. For the former the fortunes of war were less than ever favorable, and for the latter the most that was expected was the maintenance of her stand in the face of every armed reason to surrender or retreat.

The strike dragged along its wearied length. Popular sympathy, which had aided the shirtwaist-makers in their former rebellion, had lost its interest in the cause, and, as the newspapers said less, the employers became more demonstrative. Hired thugs guarded the factories and beat whatever young women dared, by the simplest words, to plead, in public, with the scab laborers. When these battles occurred the police, knowing well the interests of their masters, arrested the mere girls for assault and battery upon the thugs, forcing them to remain, if detained, on benches with women old in immorality and crime; and the magistrates before whom these dangerous female criminals were hailed, not forgetting which party to the suit could vote at the coming election, would often send the offenders to the Reformatory or the Island, where they could no longer interfere, or would impose fines calculated still more to deplete a strike-fund already pitiably shrunken. Some of the unionists had already laid down their arms and returned to the factories; more had gone over to another enemy and disappeared beneath the dark current of the underworld. The rest—and Carrie was among the number—must soon come face to face with starvation.

Katie's difficulties, though as yet less physical, were scarcely less poignant. She found that she was rarely left long in one portion of the Lennox shop. From the chief woman's-hosiery department, she was shifted, without warning, to the handkerchief counter, and thence, again with no explanation, she was sent to help in the main aisle at a table where there was a special sale of stockings at reduced prices.

At first these frequent shiftings appeared to result from no apparent cause. She was fined as much as the other clerks, but no more than they, and she could in no wise account for the changes. But at last she noticed that after a shift for the worse the sacrosanct Mr. Porter would usually happen by and open a conversation, and then she remembered that, before such a shift, this same side-whiskered gentleman had generally made overtures, and that those overtures had not been well received. The theory arising from these observations she resolved to confirm. After the next move she made deliberate eyes at the man she detested, and she was next day promoted, with a twenty-five cent increase of pay per week, to the silk-stocking counter. From that day she saw her warfare developing into a dangerous game of hide-and-seek in which Mr. Porter was "It," and from that day dated her increasing tendency to reconsider the determination not to marry Hermann Hoffmann.

For Violet, meanwhile, the young interne's prophesy had been fulfilled. Four days after her admission to the hospital there had been performed upon her that operation which had been made necessary by her servitude, but to which, had she been consulted, her fears would never have allowed her to consent. For three weeks she lay in her narrow bed among other sufferers, and, when at last the fiction of discharging her as "cured" had been accomplished, and the five-cent carfare donated by the hospital to charity-patients had been given, she had been met by Katie and Carrie, and had tottered between them to their room.

During another week she had now rested there. Her eyes were still sunken, dull, dark-rimmed; her cheeks white and transparently thin. The knuckles of her fingers seemed to have grown larger, and her hands were nearly transparent. But her lips, though bloodless, had gained a new firmness. Clearly or deeply she could never think, without help from a stronger and better mind; yet she had made what use she might of her long leisure and had resolved, more or less definitely, upon what she would do with her life.

"I went out an' walked a block by myself yesterday," she confessed to her two friends early on the evening of Hermann's political discussion with his employer; "an' I didn't get any tired an' wasn't hardly any scared. Now I want you to take me for a longer walk to-night an' then by to-morrow I'll be all right."

They protested that she must not spur her convalescence, but she was determined. It was, she knew, impossible for them much longer to support her, and the last of her one ten-dollar bill had long ago been spent.

"I'll tell you what we might do," Carrie at last suggested. "There's some sort of a concert over at the settlement to-night. We might go to that. I used to know some of the ladies there, and there's always a chance that they can get you a job."

While she was speaking Hermann's whistle, more cheerful now than when he had left the saloon, sounded on the stairs, and Katie, surprised and glad, opened the door to his knock.

"Late to your work again," she said, with a smile that belied her. "How'll you ever be holdin' that job, anyhow?"

The newcomer's only answer was a courageous and unrebuked kiss. He turned to Carrie.

"Vat you sink of such a vay of meetin' me?" he appealed. "My boss gives me a nighd off, und I haf seen my girl not fur ten days und den——"

He paused as his unrecognizing eye fell upon Violet.

"Egscuse me," he began. "I didn't see——"

"Of course you didn't see it was your old friend Violet that was an' Miss Morton that is," interrupted Katie, with a quick desire to shield her charge. "You're gettin' that near-sighted I wonder how you can tell a whiskey-glass from a beer-stein."

Hermann hurried forward in rosy embarrassment and saved Violet from rising. He took her frail hand in his big paw and poured out a tumbling stream of polite lies upon the matter of her health.

"I guess it ain't quite as good as you say," replied Violet; "but it soon will be. Have you—I didn't get no news while I was sick. Have you heard anything about—things?"

"You knew Rose's place was pinched?"

"Yes, Katie told me that."

"Well, dey had some trouble gettin' pail fur her. Everybody vas afraid fur to do it vith O'Malley after her. Still, dey vorked it somevays und nobody thought but she'd jump it und run avay; but she didn't. She tried, but O'Malley had central office men keepin' eyes on her, und she can't leaf town."

Katie and Carrie were busying themselves in the preparation of the supper, and the German seated himself beside the invalid.

"Mr. Hoffmann," she said, "I've been tryin' to think of lots of things while I've been sick, an' I'd like to know how it is that women like Miss Rose are allowed?"

He looked at her, hesitating, but her eyes were frankly curious.

"Dot's von long story," he answered in his slow tones, "un' dem as can tell it best is most all in deir houses or in deir graves, or else, in de streets."

"Then I guess I was lucky to get away."

"If you don't mind me sayin' it—yes, miss."

"But don't the girls get free when the houses are pinched?"

"No," said Hermann, as gently as he could; "dey don't get free. Ofer to de Night Court a voman has taken five s'ousand to a blace she has, und how many sink you didn't go back to de vork again? Less'n von hundret und fifty."

"I don't see how they could," said Violet.

Hermann could not see how they could do anything else, but he only shrugged his broad shoulders.

"They don't last long anyvays," he remarked.

"You mean they die soon?"

"Effery five year all de girls is new: it's as sure as life insurance."

The girl shuddered, but mastered herself.

"Don't mind that," she reassured him. "I want to know—honest. Katie and Carrie won't be bothered——"

"We can't hear a word you're sayin', darlin'," laughed Katie.

"An', honest," Violet concluded. "There's some things I think I've got to learn so's I can see it—see it all."

She appealed, it happened, to an authority. Hermann supplemented his Marx with facts and statistics of a later date, especially upon the point at issue, and he was only too glad to find in Violet the listener that he could never discover in Katie.

"You're righd," he said; "und the only pity is dot more people don't try to more about it learn. If dey did, maybe ve'd all open our eyes some."

And he proceeded to open Violet's eyes not a little. He told her of the hundreds of thousands of girls that are annually caught in the great net; of how five thousand new ones are every year needed to maintain Chicago's standing supply of twenty-five thousand; of how Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco—all the cities and the towns—are served proportionately, and of how, above all, from the crowded East Side of New York, there are dragged each week hundreds of children and young women no one of whom, if sold outright, brings as much as a capable horse.

"Some ve bring in," he said, "und some ve send out. Ve take from Italy, und ve send to Sous America. From all ofer the vorld ve take, und to all ofer the vorld ve send."

"You don't always blame the girls?"

"Plame dem? A girl as lived by us, she did tucking in a undervear factory. She has coffee und a roll fur preakfast, tea und a roll fur lunch, von biece of bacon und von egg fur supper effery nighd. Ten hours a day in a bad smelling room, crowded vis ozzer girls, she runs dot machine. Part de year she has no vork, because always de factory does not run, but vhen de years ends, dot machine, makin' four dousand stitches a minute, she has tucked dree miles of undervear und got paid dree hundred dollars. Do I plame such a girl if she easy comes to belief a paid veasel as makes lofe to her und says he marries her und gets her avay from a factory?"

"All of the girls don't come from such hard jobs though."

"So? Look now!"

He took from an inside pocket a fistful of soiled envelopes and shuffled them until he found one on which he had transcribed some figures.