Front matter (continued 3)

After that they met frequently. In the evening after supper Gusta would steal out, Peltzer would be waiting for her at the corner, and they would stroll under the trees that were rapidly filling with leaves. Once, passing Policeman Crowley, Gusta saw him looking at them narrowly. There was a little triangular park not far from Gusta's home, and there the two would sit all the evening. The moon was full, the nights were soft and mild and warm. On Sundays they went to the park where they had met, and now and then they danced in the public pavilion. But Gusta never danced with any of the other men there, nor did Peltzer dance with any of the other girls; they danced always together, looking into each other's eyes. Now she could endure the monotony and the drudgery at home, the children's peevishness, her mother's melancholy, her father's querulousness. Even Archie's predicament lost its horror and its sadness for her. She had not yet, however, told Peltzer, and she felt ashamed of Archie, as if, in creating the possibility of compromising her, he had done her a wrong. She went about in a dream, thinking of Peltzer all the time, and of the wonderful thing that had brought all this happiness into her life.

Gusta had not, however, as yet allowed Peltzer to go home with her; he went within half a block of the house, and there, in the shadow, they took their long farewell. But Peltzer was growing more masterful; each night he insisted on going a little nearer, and at last one night he clung to her, bending over her, looking into her blue eyes, his lips almost on hers, and before they were aware they were at her door. Gusta was aroused by Crowley's voice. Crowley was there with her father, telling him again the one incident in all his official career that had distinguished him for a place in the columns of the newspapers. He was just at the climax of the thrilling incident, and they heard his voice ring out:

"An' I kept right on toowards him, an' him shootin' at me breasht four toimes--"

He had got up, in the excitement he so often evoked in living over that dramatic moment again, to illustrate the action, and he saw Gusta and Charlie. Peltzer stopped, withdrew his arm hurriedly from Gusta's waist, and then Crowley, forgetting his story, called out:

"Oh-ho, me foine bucko!"

Then Koerner saw Gusta, and, forgetting for a moment, tried to rise to his feet, then dropped back again.

"Who's dot feller mit you, huh? Who's dot now?" he demanded.

"Aw, tut, tut, man," said Crowley. "Shure an' the girl manes no harm at all--an' the laad, he's a likely wan. Shure now, Misther Koerner, don't ye be haard on them--they're that young now! An' 'tis the spring, do ye moind--and it's well I can see the phite flower on the thorn tra in me ould home these days!"

Gusta's heart and Peltzer's heart warmed to Crowley, but old Koerner said:

"In mit you!"

And she slipped hurriedly indoors.

But nothing could harm her now, for the world had changed.

XV

Archie Koerner served his thirty days in the workhouse, then, because he was in debt to the State for the costs and had no money with which to pay the debt, he was kept in prison ten days longer, although it was against the constitution of that State to imprison a man for debt. Forty days had seemed a short time to Bostwick when he pronounced sentence; had he chosen, he might have given Archie a sentence, in fine and imprisonment, that would have kept him in the workhouse for two years; he frequently did this with thieves. These forty days, too, had been brief to Marriott, and to Eades, and they had been brief to Elizabeth, who had found new happiness in the fact that Mr. Amos Hunter had given Dick a position in the banking department of his Title and Trust Company. These forty days, in fact, had passed swiftly for nearly every one in the city, because they were spring days, filled with warm sunshine by day, and soft and musical showers by night. The trees were pluming themselves in new green, the birds were singing, and people were happy in their release from winter; they were busied about new clothes, with riding and driving, with plans for summer vacations and schemes for the future; they were all imbued with the spirit of hope the spring had brought to the world again. To Gusta, too, in her love, these days had passed swiftly, like a hazy, golden dream.

But to Archie these forty days had not been forty days at all, but a time of infinite duration. He counted each day as it dragged by; he counted it when he came from his bunk in the morning; he counted it every hour during the long day's work over the hideous bricks he could find no joy in making; he counted it again at evening, and the last thing before he fell asleep. It seemed that forty days would never roll around.

They did pass finally, and a morning came when he could leave the comrades of his misery. He felt some regret in doing this; many of them had been kind to him, and friendships had been developed by means of whispers and signs, but more by the silent influence of a common suffering. He had quarreled and almost fought with some of them, for the imprisonment had developed the beast that was in them, and had made many of them morose, ugly, suspicious, dangerous, filling them with a kind of moral insanity. But he forgot all these enmities in the joy of his release, and he bade his friends good-by and wished them luck. In the superintendent's office they gave him back his clothes, and he went out again into the world.

It was strange to be at liberty again. His first unconscious impulse was to take up his life where he had left it off, but he did not know how to do this. For behind him stretched an unknown time, a blank, a break in his existence, which refused to adjust itself to the rest of his life; it bore no relation to that existence which was himself, his being, and yet it was there. The world that knew no such blank or break had gone on meanwhile and left him behind, and he could not catch up now. He was like a man who had been unconscious and had awakened with a blurred conception of things; it was as if he had come out of a profound anæsthesia, to find that he had been irrevocably maimed by some unnecessary operation in surgery.

Archie did not, of course, realize all this clearly; had he been able to do so, he might have avoided some of the consequences. But he had a troubled sense of change, and he was to learn it and realize it fully only by a slow, torturing process, a bit at a time. He had the first sensation of this change in the peculiar gleam that came into the eye of a policeman he passed in Market Place, and he felt it, too, when, half fearfully, he presented himself at the back door of his home. His father's fury had long since abated, but he showed that he could not look on Archie as he once had done, and Gusta showed it, too. Bostwick may have thought he had sentenced Archie to forty days in prison, but he had really sentenced him to a lifetime in prison; for the influences of those forty days could never leave Archie now; the shadows of that prison were ever lengthening, and they were for evermore to creep with him wherever he went, keeping him always within their shades. He was thereafter to be but an umbra at the feast of life.

Archie could not think of the whole matter very clearly; of the theft of which he had been convicted he scarcely thought at all. The change that came in the world's attitude toward him did not seem to be concerned with that act; it was never mentioned or even suggested to him at home or elsewhere. The thing that marked him was not the fact that he had been a thief, but that he had been a prisoner. When he did think of the theft, he told himself that he had paid for that; the score had been wiped out; the world had taken its revenge on him. This revenge was expressed by the smile that lit up the face of the grocer whose herrings had been stolen; it had been shown in the satisfaction of the prosecutor when the judge announced his finding; it had been expressed by the harshness of the superintendent and the guards at the workhouse; it was shown even by the glance of that policeman he met in the Market. The world had wreaked its vengeance on him, and Archie felt that it should be satisfied now.

There was but one place now where the atmosphere lacked the element of suspicion and distrust, but one place where he was not made to feel the barrier that separated him from other men, and that was with the gang. The gang welcomed him with a frank heartiness; they showed almost the same eagerness and pleasure in him that they showed in welcoming Spud and the others. There was balm in their welcome; they asked no questions, they drew no distinctions; to them he was the same old Archie, only grown nearer because now he could unite with them in experience--they all had those same gaps in their lives.

That afternoon they celebrated with cans of beer in the shade of a lumber pile, and that night the gang went down the line. Having some money, they were welcome in all the little saloons, and the girls in short dresses, who stood about the bars rolling cigarettes constantly, were glad to see them. And Archie found that no questions were asked here, that no distinctions were made even when respected, if not respectable, men appeared, even when the prosecutor of the police court came along with a companion, and spent a portion of the salary these people contributed so heavily to pay, even when the detectives came and received the tribute money. And it dawned on Archie that here was a little quarter of the world where he was wanted, where he was made to feel at home, where that gap in his life made no difference. It was a small quarter, covering scarcely more than a dozen blocks. It was filled with miserable buildings, painted garishly and blazing with light; there was ever the music of pianos and orchestras, and in the saloons that were half theaters, bands blared out rapid tunes. And here was swarming life; here, in the midst of death. But it was an important quarter of the town; in rents and dividends and fines it contributed largely of the money it made at such risk and sacrifice of body and of soul, to all that was accounted good and great in the city. It helped to pay the salaries of the mayor and the judges and the prosecutors and the clerks and the detectives and the policemen; some of its money went to support in idleness and luxury many dainty and exclusive women in Claybourne Avenue, to build enormous churches, to pay for stained-glass windows with pictures of Christ and the Magdalene, pictures that in soft artistic hues lent a gentle religious and satisfying melancholy to the ladies and gentlemen who sat in their pews on Sundays; it even helped to send missionaries to far countries like Japan and China and India and Africa, in order that the heathen who lived there might receive the light of the Cross.

While in the workhouse Archie had occupied the same cell with a man called Joseph Mason, which was not his name. The prison was crowded, and it was necessary for the prisoners to double up. The cells were narrow and had two bunks, one above and the other below--there was as much room as there is in a section of a sleeping-car. In these cells the men slept and ate and lived, spending all the time they did not pass at labor in the brick-yard. During those forty days Archie became well acquainted with Mason; they sat on their little stools all day Sunday and talked, and when they climbed into their bunks at night they whispered. They shared with each other their surreptitious matches and tobacco--all they had.

This man Mason was nearly fifty years old. His close-cropped hair and his close-shaven beard gave his head and cheeks and lips a uniform color of dark blue; his lips were thin and compressed from a habit of taciturnity, his eyes were small, bright and alert; at any sound he would turn quickly and glance behind him. He had spent twenty years in prison--ten years in Dannemora, five in Columbus, three in Allegheny and two in Joliet. This, however, did not include the time he had been shut up in police stations, calabooses, county jails and workhouses. In the present instance he had been arrested for pocket-picking, and had agreed to plead guilty if the offense were reduced to petit larceny; the authorities had accepted his proposal, and he had been sentenced to six months in the workhouse. He had served four and a half months of his sentence when Archie went into the workhouse.

The only time when Mason showed any marked sense of humor was when he told Archie of his having confessed to pocket-picking. The truth was that he was totally innocent of this crime, and if the police had been wise they would have known this. Mason was a Johnny Yegg, that is, an itinerant safe-blower. As a yegg man, of course, he never had picked a pocket, and could not have done so had he wished, for he did not know how; and if he had known how, still he would not have done so, for the yeggs held such crimes as picking pockets in contempt. All of the terms he had served in states' prisons had been for blowing safes, and all of the safes had been in rural post-offices. The technical charge was burglary, though he was not a burglar, either, in the sense of entering dwellings by night; this was a class of thieving left to prowlers. The preceding fall, however, a safe had been blown in a country post-office near the city, and Mason knew that the United States inspectors would suspect him if they found him, and while he had been innocent of that particular crime, he knew that this would make no difference to the inspectors; they would willingly "job" him, as he expressed it, justifying the act to any one who might question it--they would not need to justify it to themselves--by arguing that if he had not blown that particular safe he had blown others, so that the balance would be dressed in the end. Consequently, when the police arrested him for pocket-picking, he hailed it as a stroke of good fortune and looked on the workhouse as an asylum. He had been a model prisoner, and had given the authorities no trouble. He did this partly because he was a philosophical fellow, patient and uncomplaining, partly because he did not wish to attract attention to himself. His picture and his measurements, taken according to the Bertillon system, were in every police station in the land.

Mason told Archie many interesting stories of his life, of cooking over a fire in the woods, riding on freight trains, of hang-outs in sand-houses, and so on, and he told circumstantially of numerous crimes, though never did he identify himself as concerned in any of them excepting those of which he had been convicted, and in these he did not give the names of his accomplices. Before their companionship ended he had taught Archie the distinctions between yegg men and peter men and gay cats, guns of various kinds, prowlers, and sure-thing men, and the other unidentified horde of criminals who belong to none of these classes.

He had taught Archie also many little tricks whereby a convict's lot may be lightened--as, for instance, how to split with a pin one match into four matches, how to pass little things from one cell to another by a "trolley" or piece of string, how to lie on a board, and so on. But, above all, he had set Archie the example of a patient man who took things as they came, without question or complaint.

Archie missed Mason. He could see him sitting in the gloom of their little cell, upright and almost never moving, talking in a low tone, his lips, which had a streak of tobacco always on them, moving slowly, shutting tightly after each sentence, until he had swallowed, then deliberately he would go on. Mason's view of life interested Archie, who, up to that time, had never thought at all, had never made any distinctions, and so had no view of life at all. Many of Mason's views were striking in their insight, many were childish in their lack of it; they were curiously straightforward at times, at others astonishingly oblique. He had a great hatred of sham and pretense, and he considered all so-called respectable people as hypocrites. He had about the same contempt for them that he had for the guns, who were sneaks, he said, afraid to take chances. He had a high admiration for boldness and courage, and a great love of adventure, and he thought that all these qualities were best exemplified in yegg men. For the courts he had no respect at all; his contempt was so deep-rooted that he never once considered the possibility of their doing justice, and spoke as if it were axiomatic that they could not do justice if they tried. He had the same contempt for the church, although he seemed to know much about the life of Jesus and had respect for His teachings. He called the people who came to pray and sing on Sundays "mission stiffs"; he treated them respectfully enough, but he told Archie that those prisoners who took an interest in the services did so that they might secure favors and perhaps pardons. He had known many convicts to secure their liberty in that way, and while he gave them credit for cleverness and was not disposed to blame them, still he did not respect them. Such convicts he called "false alarms."

There were one or two judges before whom he had been tried that he admired and thought to be good men. He did not blame them for the sentences they had given him, but explained to Archie that they had to do this as an incident of their business, and he spoke as if they might have shared his own regret in the cruel necessity. Of all prosecutors, however, he had a hatred; especially of Eades, of whom he seemed to have heard much. He told Archie that as a result of Eades's severity the thieves some day would "rip" the town.

He looked on his own occupation and spoke of it as any man might look on his own occupation; it simply happened that that was his business. He seemed to consider it as honest as, or at least no more dishonest than, any other business. He had certain standards, and these he maintained. On the whole, however, he concluded that his business hardly paid, though it had its compensations in its adventure and in its free life.

XVI

Archie was loitering along Market Place, not sure of what he would do that evening, but ready for any sensation chance might offer. Men were brushing through the flapping green doors of the small saloons, talking loudly, and swearing, many of them already drunk. Pianos were going, and above all the din he heard the grating of a phonograph grinding out the song some minstrel once had sung to a banjo; the banjo notes were realistic, but the voice of the singer floated above the babel of voices like the mere ghost of a voice, inhuman and not alive, as perhaps the singer might not then have been alive. Archie, wondering where the gang was, suddenly met Mason. The sight gave him real pleasure.

"Hello, Joe!" he cried as he seized Mason's hand.

Mason smiled faintly, but Archie's joy made him happy.

"Je's," said Archie, "I'm glad to see you--it makes me feel better. When 'd you get out?"

"This morning," Mason replied. "Which way?"

"Oh, anywhere," said Archie. "Where you goin'?"

"Up to Gibbs's. Want to go 'long?"

Archie's heart gave a little start; to go to Danny Gibbs's under Mason's patronage would be a distinction. The evening opened all at once with sparkling possibilities.

"An old friend o' mine's there," Mason explained as they walked along up Kentucky Street. "He's just got out of a shooting scrape; he croaked that fellow Benny Moon. Remember?"

Gibbs's place was scarcely more than a block away; it displayed no sign; a three-story building of brick, a side door, and a plate-glass window in front; a curtain hiding half the window, a light above--that was all.

Mason entered with an assurance that impressed Archie, who had never before felt the need of assurance in entering a saloon. He looked about; it was like any other saloon, a long bar and a heavy mirror that reflected the glasses and the bottles of green and yellow liqueurs arranged before it. At one table sat a tattered wreck of a man, his head bowed on his forearms crossed on the table, fast asleep--one of the many broken lives that found with Danny Gibbs a refuge. Over the mirror behind the bar hung an opium pipe, long since disused, serving as a relic now, the dreams with which it had once relieved the squalor and remorse of a wasted life long since broken.

At Mason's step, however, there was a stir in the room behind the bar-room, and a woman entered. She walked heavily, as if her years and her flesh were burdensome; her face was heavy, tired and expressionless. She was plainly making for the bar, as if to keep alive the pretense of a saloon, but when she saw Mason she stopped, her face lighted up, becoming all at once matronly and pleasant, and she smiled as she came forward, holding out a hand.

"Why, Joe," she said, "is that you? When did you get out?"

"This morning," he said. "Where's Dan?"

"He's back here; come in," and she turned and led the way.

Mason followed, drawing Archie behind him, and they entered the room behind the bar-room. The atmosphere changed--the room was light, it was lived in, and the four men seated at a round bare table gave to the place its proper character. Three of the men had small tumblers filled with whisky before them, the fourth had none; he sat tilted back in his chair, his stiff hat pulled down over his eyes, his hands sunk in the pockets of his trousers; his fat thighs flattened on the edge of his chair. He was dressed in modest gray, and might have been taken for a commonplace business man. He lifted his blue eyes quickly and glanced at the intruders; his face was round and cleanly shaved, save for a little blond mustache that curled at the corners of his mouth. His hair, of the same color as his mustache, glistened slightly at the temples, where it was touched by gray. This man had no whisky glass before him--he did not drink, but he sat there with an air of presiding over this little session, plainly vested with some authority--sat, indeed, as became Danny Gibbs, the most prominent figure in the under world.

Gibbs's place was only ostensibly a saloon; in reality it was a clearing-house for thieves, where accounts were settled with men who had been robbed under circumstances that made it advisable for them to keep the matter secret, and where balances were adjusted with the police. All the thieves of the higher class--those who traveled on railway trains and steamboats, fleecing men in games of cards, those of that class who were well-dressed, well-informed, pleasant-mannered, apparently respectable, who passed everywhere for men of affairs, and stole enormous sums by means of a knowledge of human nature that was almost miraculous--were friends of Gibbs. He negotiated for them; he helped them when they were in trouble; when they were in the city they lived at his house--sometimes they lived on him. The two upper floors of his establishment, fitted like a hotel, held many strange and mysterious guests. Gibbs maintained the same relation with the guns, the big-mitt men, and sneak-thieves, and he bore the same relation to the yegg men and to the prowlers. By some marvelous tact he kept apart all these classes, so different, so antipathetic, so jealous and suspicious of one another, and when they happened to meet he kept them on terms. There never were loud words or trouble at Gibbs's. To all these classes of professional criminals he was a kind of father, an ever-ready friend who never forgot or deserted them. When they were in jail he sent lawyers to them, he provided them with delicacies, he paid their fines. Sometimes he obtained pardons and commutations for them, for he was naturally influential in politics and maintained relations with Ralph Keller, the boss of the city, that were as close as those he maintained with the police. He could provide votes for primaries, and he could do other things. The police never molested him, though now and then they threatened to, and then he was forced to increase the tribute money, already enormous. A part of his understanding with the police, a clause in the modus vivendi, was that certain friends of Gibbs's were to be harbored in the city on condition that they committed no crimes while there; now and then when a crime was committed in the city, it would be made the excuse by the police for further extortion. The detectives came and went as freely at Gibbs's as the guns, the yeggs, the prowlers, the sure-thing men, the gamblers and bunco men.

"Ah, Joe," said Gibbs, glancing at Mason.

"Dan," said Mason, as he took a chair beside Gibbs. They had spoken in low, quiet tones, yet somehow the simplicity of their greeting suggested a friendship that antedated all things of the present, stretching back into other days, recalling ties that had been formed at times and under circumstances that were lost in the past and forgotten by every one, even the police. However well the other three might have known Gibbs, they delicately implied that their relation could not be so close as that of Joe Mason, and they were silent for an instant, as if they would pay a tribute to it. But the silence held, losing all at once its deference to the friendship of Gibbs and Mason, and taking on a quality of constraint, cold and repellent, plainly due to Archie's presence. Archie felt this instantly, and Mason felt it, for he knew the ways of his kind, and, turning to Gibbs, he said:

"A friend of mine; met him in the boob." And then he said: "Mr. Gibbs, let me introduce Mr. Koerner."

Gibbs looked at Archie keenly and gave him his hand. Then Mason introduced Archie to the three other men--Jackson, Mandell and Keenan. Gibbs, meanwhile, turned to his wife, who had taken a chair against the wall and folded her arms.

"Get Joe and his friend something to drink, Kate," he commanded. The woman rose wearily, asked them what they wished to drink, and went into the bar-room for the whisky glasses.

The little company had accepted Archie tentatively on Mason's assurance, but they resumed their conversation guardedly and without spontaneity. Mason, however, gave it a start again when he turned to Jackson and said:

"Well, Curly, I read about your trouble. I was glad you wasn't ditched. I thought for a while there that you was the fall guy, all right."

Jackson laughed without mirth and flecked the ash from his cigarette.

"Yes, Joe, I come through."

"He sprung you down there, too!" said Mason with more surprise than Archie had ever known him to show. "I figured you'd waive, anyhow."

"Well, I wanted a show-down, d'ye see?" said Jackson. "I knew they couldn't hold me on the square."

"Didn't they know anything?"

"Who, them chuck coppers?" Jackson sneered. "Not a thing; they guessed a whole lot, and when I got out they asked if I'd object to be mugged." Jackson was showing his perfect teeth in a smile that attracted Archie. "They'd treated me so well, I was ready to oblige them--d'ye see?--and I let 'em--so they took my Bertillon. I didn't think one more would hurt much."

Jackson looked down at the table and smiled introspectively. The smile won Archie completely. He was looking at Jackson with admiration in his eyes, and Jackson, suddenly noticing him, conveyed to Archie subtly a sense of his own pleasure in the boy's admiration.

"Well, I tell you, Curly," Mason was going on. "You done right--that fink got just what was comin' to him. You showed the nerve, too. I couldn't 'ave waited half that long. But I didn't think you'd stand a show with Bostwick. I knowed you'd get off in front of a jury, but I had my misdoubts about that fellow Eades. God! he's a cold proposition! But in front of Bostwick--!" Mason slowly and incredulously shook his head, then ended by swallowing his little glassful of whisky suddenly.

"Well, you see, Joe," Jackson began, speaking in a high, shrill voice, as if it were necessary to convince Mason, "there was nothin' to it. There was no chance for the bulls to job me on this thing," and he went on to explain, as if he had to vindicate his exercise of judgment in a delicate situation, seeming to forget how completely the outcome had justified it.

Archie had scarcely noticed Keenan and Mandell; once he had wrested his eyes from Gibbs, he had not taken them from Jackson. He had been puzzled at first, but now, in a flash, he recognized in Jackson the man who had shot Moon.

"You see, Joe," Mandell suddenly spoke up--his voice was a rumbling bass in harmony with his heavy jaws--"it was a clear case of self-defense. The shamming-pusher starts out to clean up down the line, he unsloughs up there by Connie's place on Caldwell, and musses a wingy, and then he goes across the street and bashes a dinge; he goes along that way, bucklin' into everybody he meets, until he meets Curly, who was standing down there by Sailor Goin's drum chinnin' Steve Noonan--he goes up to them and begins. Curly mopes off; he dogs him down to Cliff Decker's corner, catches up and gives Curly a clout in the gash--"

Mason was listening intently, leaning forward, his keen eyes fixed on Mandell's. He was glad, at last, to have the story from one he could trust to give the details correctly; theretofore he had had nothing but the accounts in the newspapers, and he had no more confidence in the newspapers than he had in the courts or the churches, or any other institution of the world above him. Archie listened, too, finding a new fascination in the tale, though he had had it already from one of the gang, Pat Whalen, who had been fortunate enough to see the tragedy, and had had the distinction of testifying in the case. Whalen had seen Moon, a bartender with pugilistic ambitions, make an unprovoked assault on Jackson, follow him to the corner, and knock him down; he had seen Jackson stagger to his feet, draw his revolver and back away. He had told Archie how deathly white Jackson's face had gone as he backed, backed, a whole block, a crowd following, and Moon coming after, cursing and swearing, taunting Jackson, daring him to shoot, telling him he was "four-flushing with that smoke-wagon," warning him to make a good job when he did shoot, for he intended to make him eat his gun. He had told how marvelously cool Jackson was; he had said in a low voice, "I don't want to shoot you--I just want you to let me alone." And Whalen had described how Moon had flung off his coat, how bystanders had tried to restrain him, how he had rushed on, how Jackson had gone into the vacant lot by old Jim Peppers's shanty, coming out on the other side, until he was met by Eva Clason, who tried to open a gate and let Jackson into the brothel she called home. Whalen had given Archie a sense of the ironical fate that that day had led Eva's piano player to nail up the gate so that the chickens she had bought could not get out of the yard. The gate would not open and Moon was on him again; and Jackson backed and backed, clear around to the sidewalk on Caldwell Street, and then, when he had completed the circuit, Moon had sprung at him. Then the revolver had cracked, the crowd closed in, and there lay Moon on the sidewalk, dead--and Jackson looking down at him. Then the cries for air, the patrol wagon, and the police.

As Mandell told the story now, Archie kept his eyes on Jackson. At the point where he had said, "I don't want to shoot you," Jackson's eyes grew moist with tears; he blinked and knocked the ashes from his cigarette with the nail of his little finger, sprinkling them on the floor. When Mandell had done, Mason looked up at Jackson.

"Well, Curly," he said, "you had the right nerve."

"Nerve!" said Mandell. "I guess so!"

"Nerve!" repeated Keenan. "He had enough for a whole mob!"

"Ach!" said Jackson, twisting away from them on his chair.

"I'd 'a' let him have it when he first bashed me," said Keenan.

"Yes!" cried Jackson suddenly, rising and catching his chair by the back. "Yes--and been settled for it! I didn't want to do it; I didn't want to get into trouble. You always was that way, Jimmy."

Archie looked at Curly Jackson as he stood with an arm outstretched toward Keenan; his figure was tall and straight and slender, and as he noted the short brown curls that gave him his name, the tanned cheeks, the attitude in which he held himself, something confused Archie, some thought he could not catch--some idea that evaded him, coming near till he was just on the point of grasping it, then eluding him, like a name one tries desperately to recall.

"I didn't have my finger on the trigger," Jackson went on, speaking in his high, shrill, excited voice. "I held it on the trigger-guard all the time."

And then suddenly it came to Archie--that bronzed skin, that set of the shoulders, that trimness, that alertness, that coolness, Jackson could have got nowhere but in the army. He had been a soldier--what was more, he had been a regular. And Archie felt something like devotion for him.

"Sit down, Curly," said Gibbs, and Jackson sank into his chair. A minute later Jackson turned to Mason and said quietly:

"You see, Joe, I don't like to talk about it--nor to think of it. I didn't want to kill him, God knows. I don't see anything in it to get swelled about and be the wise guy."

XVII

Curly Jackson sat for a moment idly making little circles on the polished surface of the table with the moist bottom of his glass; then abruptly he rose and left the room. The others followed him with their eyes. Archie was deeply interested. He longed to talk to Jackson, longed to show him how he admired him, but he was timid in this company, and felt that it became him best to remain quiet. But Jackson's conduct in the tragedy had fired Archie's imagination, and Jackson was as much the hero in his eyes as he was in the eyes of his companions. And then Archie thought of his own skill with the carbine and the revolver, and he wished he could display it to these men; perhaps in that way he could attract their notice and gain their approval.

"He doesn't want to talk about it," said Mason when Jackson had disappeared.

"No," said Gibbs. "Let him alone."

Jackson was gone but a few minutes, and then he returned and quietly took his seat at the table. They talked of other things then, but Archie could understand little they said, for they spoke in a language that was almost wholly unintelligible to him. But he sat and listened with a bewildering sense of mystery that made their conversation all the more fascinating. What they said conveyed to him a sense of a wild, rough, dangerous life that was full of adventure and a kind of low romance, and Archie felt that he would like to know these men better; if possible, to be one of them, and at the thought his heart beat faster, as at the sudden possibility of a new achievement.

As they talked voices were heard in the bar-room outside, and presently a huge man stood in the door-way. He was fully six feet in height, and blond. His face was red, and he was dressed in dark gray clothes, a blue polka-dotted cravat giving his attire its one touch of color. He reminded Archie of some one, and he tried to think who that person was.

"Oh, Dan," the man in the doorway said, "come here a minute."

Gibbs went into the bar-room.

"Who's that?" asked Mandell.

"He's a swell, all right," said Keenan.

The three, Mandell, Keenan and Jackson, looked at Mason as if he could tell. But Archie suddenly remembered.

"He looks like an army officer," he said, speaking his thought aloud.

"What do you know about army officers, young fellow?" demanded Jackson. The others turned, and Archie blushed. But he did not propose to have Jackson put him down.

"Well," he said with spirit, "I know something--I was in the regular army three years."

"What regiment?" Jackson fixed Archie with his blue eyes, and there seemed to be just a trace of concern in their keen, searching glance.

"The twelfth cavalry," said Archie. "I served in the Philippines."

"Oh!" said Jackson, as if relieved, and he released Archie from his look. Archie felt relieved, too, and went on:

"He looks just like a colonel in the English army I saw at Malta. Our transport stopped there."

"It's Lon McDougall," said Mason when Archie had finished. "He's a big-mitt man."

The others turned away with an effect of lost interest and something like a sneer.

"I suppose there's a lot o' those guns out there," said Keenan.

"A mob come in this afternoon," said Mason; "they're working eastward out of Chicago with the rag."

"Well, let's make a get-away," said Keenan, unable to conceal a yegg man's natural contempt of the guns.

They all got up, Archie with them, and went out. In the bar-room five men were standing; they were all men of slight figure, dressed well and becomingly, and with a certain alert, sharp manner. They cast quick, shifty glances at the men who came out of the back room, but there was no recognition between them. These men, as Mason had said, were all pickpockets; they had come to town that afternoon, and naturally repaired at once to Gibbs's. They had come in advance of a circus that was to be in the city two days later, and were happy in the hope of being able to work under protection. They knew Cleary as a chief of police with whom an arrangement could be made, and McDougall, who had come in to work on circus day himself, had kindly agreed to secure them this protection. At that moment, indeed, McDougall was whispering with Gibbs at the end of the bar; they were discussing the "fixing" of Cleary.

The pickpockets had been talking rather excitedly. They were glad at the prospect of the circus, and, in common with the rest of humanity, they were glad that spring had come, partly from a natural human love of this time of joy and hope, partly because the spring was the beginning of the busy season. They could do more in summer, when people were stirring about, just as the yegg men could do more in winter, when the nights were long and windows were closed and people kept indoors. But at the appearance of Mason and his friends, one of the pickpockets gave the thieves' cough, and they were silent. McDougall glanced about, then resumed his low talk with Gibbs.

"Give us a little drink, Kate," said Jackson, who seemed to have money. As they stood there pouring out their whisky, a little girl with a tray of flowers entered the saloon, and the pickpockets instantly bought all her carnations and adorned themselves. And then a man entered, a small man, with a wry, comical face and a twisted, deformed figure; his left hand was curled up as if he had been paralyzed on that side from his youth. But once behind the big walnut screen which shut off the view from the street, he straightened suddenly and became as well formed as any one. His comedian's face broke into a smile, and he greeted every one there familiarly; he knew them all--Gibbs and McDougall, the pickpockets, and the yegg men, and he burst into loud congratulations when he saw Jackson.

"Well, Curly," he said, "you gave that geezer all that was coming to him! You--"

"Cheese it, Jimmy," said Jackson. "I don't want to hear any more about that."

Jackson spoke with such authority that the little fellow stepped back, the smile that was on his lips faded suddenly, and he joined the pickpockets. The little fellow was a grubber; he could throw his body instantly into innumerable hideous shapes of deformity; he had not the courage to be a thief, was afraid to sleep in a barn, and so had become a beggar.

As Mason bade Gibbs good night and went out he was laughing, and Archie had not often seen him laugh. On the way down the street he told stories of Jimmy's abilities as a beggar, and they all laughed, all save Jackson, who was gloomy and morose and walked along shrouded in a kind of gloom that impressed Archie powerfully.

And now new days dawned for Archie--days of association with Mason, Jackson, Keenan and Mandell. The Market Place gang had no standing among professional criminals, though it had furnished recruits, and now Archie became a recruit, and soon approved himself. It was not long until he could speak their language; he called a safe a "peter" and nitroglycerin "soup," a freight-train was a "John O'Brien"; he spoke of a man convicted as a "fall man", conveying thus subtly a sense of vicarious sacrifice; he called policemen "bulls", and jails "pogeys"; the penitentiary where all these men had been was the "stir", and the little packages of buttered bread and pie that were handed out to them from kitchen doors were "lumps". And he learned the distinctions between the classes of men who defy society and its laws; he knew what gay cats were, and guns and dips, lifters, moll-buzzers, hoisters, tools, scratchers, stalls, damper-getters, housemen, gopher-men, peter-men, lush-touchers, super-twisters, penny-weighters, and so forth. And after that he was seen at home but seldom; his absences grew long and mysterious.

XVIII

Elizabeth did not go often to the Country Club, and almost never for any pleasure she herself could find; now and then she went with her father, in order to lure him out of doors; but to-day she had come with Dick, who wanted some fitting destination for his new touring car. She was finding on a deserted end of the veranda a relief from the summer heat that for a week had smothered the city. A breeze was blowing off the river, and she lay back languidly in her wicker chair and let it play upon her brow. In her lap lay an open book, but she was not reading it nor meditating on it; she held it in readiness to ward off interruption; her reputation as a reader of books, while it made her formidable to many and gave her an unpopularity that was more and more grieving her mother, had its compensations--people would not often intrude upon a book. She looked off across the river. On its smooth surface tiny sail-boats were moving; on the opposite bank there was the picturesque windmill of a farm-house, white against the bright green. The slender young oak trees were rustling in the wind; the links were dotted with players in white, and the distant flags and fluttering guidons that marked hidden putting greens. Then suddenly Marriott was before her. He had come in from the links, and he stood now bareheaded, glowing from his exercise, folding his arms on the veranda rail. His forearms were blazing red from their first burning of the season, and his nose was burned red, giving him a merry look that made Elizabeth smile.

"My! but you're burned!" she exclaimed.

"Am I?" said Marriott, pleased.

"Yes--like a mower," she added, remembering some men working in a field that had fled past them as they came out in the automobile. She remembered she had fancied the men burned brown as golfers, and she had some half-formed notion of a sentence she might turn at the expense of a certain literary school that viewed life thus upside down. She might have gone on then and talked it over with Marriott, but her brain was too tired; she could moralize just then no further than to say:

"You don't deserve to be burned as a mower--your work isn't as hard."

"No," said Marriott, "it isn't work at all--it's exercise; it's a substitute for the work I should be doing." A look of disgust came to his face.

She did not wish then to talk seriously; she was trying to forget problems, and she and Marriott were always discussing problems.

"It's absurd," Marriott was saying. "I do this to get the exercise I ought to get by working, by producing something--the exercise is the end, not an incident of the means. You don't see any of these farmers around here playing golf. They're too tired--"

"Gordon," said Elizabeth, "I'm going away."

"Where to?" he asked, looking up suddenly.

"To Europe," she said.

"Europe! Why, when? You must have decided hurriedly."

"Yes, the other night after I came home from Mr. Parrish's--we decided rather quickly--or papa decided for us."

"Well!" Marriott exclaimed again. "That's fine!"

He looked away toward the first tee, where his caddie was waiting for him. He beckoned, and the boy came with his bag.

"Tell Mr. Phillips I'll not play any more--I'll see him later."

The caddie took up the bag and went lazily away, stopping to take several practice swings with one of Marriott's drivers. The boy was always swinging this club in the hope that Marriott would give it to him.

Marriott placed his hands on the rail, sprang over it, and drew up a chair.

"Well, this is sudden," he said, "but it's fine for you." He took out a cigarette. "How did it happen?"

"Do you want the real reason?" she asked.

"Of course; I've a passion for the real."

"I'm going in order to get away."

Marriott was sheltering in his palms a match for his cigarette. He looked up suddenly, the cigarette still between his lips.

"Away from what?"

"Oh, from--everything!" She waved her hands despairingly. Marriott did not understand.

"That's it," she said, looking him in the eyes. He saw that she was very serious. He lighted his cigarette, and flung away the match that was just beginning to burn his fingers.

"I'm going to run away; I'm going to forget for a whole summer. I'm going to have a good time. When I come back in the fall I'm going to the Charity Bureau and do some work, but until then--"

"Who's going with you?" asked Marriott. He had thought of other things to say, but decided against them.

"Mama."

"And your father?"

"Oh, he can't go. He and Dick will stay at home."

"Then you won't shut up the house?"

"No, we'll let the maids go, but we've got Gusta Koerner to come in every day and look after things. I'm glad for her sake--and ours. We can trust her."

"I should think Dick would want to go."

"No, he has this new automobile now, and he says, too, that he can't leave the bank." She smiled as she thought of the seriousness with which Dick was regarding his new duties.

"Then you'll not go to Mackinac?"

"No, we'll close the cottage this summer. Papa doesn't want to go there without us, and--"

"But Dick will miss his yacht."

"Oh, the yacht has been wholly superseded in his affections by the auto."

"Well," said Marriott, "I'll not go north myself then. I had thought of going up and hanging around, but now--"

She looked to see if he were in earnest.

"Really, I'm not as excited over the prospect of going to Europe as I should be," said Elizabeth with a little regret in her tone. "I haven't been in Europe since I graduated, and I've been looking forward to going again--"

"Oh, you'll have a great time," Marriott interrupted.

She leaned back and Marriott eyed her narrowly; he saw that her look was weary.

"Well, you need a rest. It was such a long, hard winter."

Elizabeth did not reply. She looked away across the river and Marriott followed her gaze; the sky in the west was darkening, the afternoon had grown sultry.

"Gordon," she said presently, "I want you to do something for me."

His heart leaped a little at her words.

"Anything you say," he answered.

"Won't you"--she hesitated a moment--"won't you look after Dick a little this summer? Just keep an eye on him, don't you know?"

Marriott laughed, and then he grew sober. He realized that he, perhaps, understood the seriousness that was behind her request better than she did, but he said nothing, for it was all so difficult.

"Oh, he doesn't need any watching," he said, by way of reassuring her.

"You will understand me, I'm sure." She turned her gray eyes on him. "I think it is a critical time with him. I don't know what he does--I don't want to know; I don't mean that you are to pry about, or do anything surreptitious, or anything of that sort. You know, of course; don't you?"

"Why, certainly," he said.

"But I have felt--you see," she scarcely knew how to go about it; "I have an idea that if he could have a certain kind of influence in his life, something wholesome--I think you could supply that."

Marriott was moved by her confidence; he felt a great affection for her in that instant.

"It's good in you, Elizabeth," he said, and he lingered an instant in pronouncing the syllables of her name, "but you really overestimate. Dick's all right, but he's young. I'm not old, to be sure; but he'd think me old."

"I can see that would be in the way," she frankly admitted. "I don't know just how it could be done; perhaps it can't be done at all."

"And then, besides all that," Marriott went on, "I don't know of any good I could do him. I don't know that there is anything he really needs more than we all need."

"Oh, yes there is," she insisted. "And there is much you could give him. Perhaps it would bore you--"

He protested.

"Oh, I know!" she said determinedly. "We can be frank with each other, Gordon. Dick is a man only in size and the clothes he wears; he's still a child--a good, kind-hearted, affectionate, thoughtless child. The whole thing perplexes me and it has perplexed papa--you might as well know that. I have tried, and I can do nothing. He doesn't care for books, and somehow when I prescribe books and they fail, or are not accepted, I'm at the end of my resources. I have been trying to think it all out, but I can't. I know that something is wrong, but I can't tell you what it is. I only know that I feel it, and that it troubles me and worries me--and that I am tired." Then, as if he might misunderstand, she went on with an air of haste: "I don't mean necessarily anything wrong in Dick himself, but something wrong in--oh, I don't know what I mean!"

She lifted her hand in a little gesture of despair.

"I feel somehow that the poor boy has had no chance in the world--though he has had every advantage and opportunity." Her face lighted up instantly with a kind of pleasure. "That's it!" she exclaimed. "You see"--it was all clear to her just then, or would be if she could put the thought into words before she lost it--"there is nothing for him to do; there is no work for him, no necessity for his working at all. This new place he has in the Trust Company--he seems happy and important in it just now, but after all it doesn't seem to me real; he isn't actually needed there; he got the place just because Mr. Hunter is a friend of papa." The thought that for an instant had seemed on the point of being posited was nebulous again. "Don't you understand?" she said, turning to him for help.

"I think I do," said Marriott. His brows were contracted and he was trying to grasp her meaning.

"It's hard to express," Elizabeth went on. "I think I mean that Dick would be a great deal better off if he did not have a--rich father." She hesitated before saying it, a little embarrassed. "If he had to work, if he had his own way to make in the world--"

"It is generally considered a great blessing to have a rich father," said Marriott.

"Yes," said Elizabeth, "it is. I've heard that very word used--in church, too. But with Dick"--she went back to the personal aspect of the question, which seemed easier--"what is his life? Last summer, up at the island, it was the yacht--with a hired skipper to do the real work. This summer it's the touring-car; it's always some sensation, something physical, something to kill time with--and what kind of conception of life is that?"

She turned and looked at him with' a little arch of triumph in her brows, at having attained this expression of her thought.

"We all have a conception of life that is more or less confused," Marriott generalized. "That is, when we have any conception at all."

"Of course," said Elizabeth, "I presume Dick's conception is as good as mine; and that his life is quite as useful. My life has been every bit as objective--I have a round of little duties--teas and balls and parties, and all that sort of thing, of course. I've been sheltered, like all girls of my class; but poor Dick--he's exposed, that is the difference."

She was silent for a while. Marriott had not known before how deep her thought had gone.

"I'm utterly useless in the world," she went on, "and I'm sick of it! Sick of it!" She had grown vehement, and her little fists clenched in her lap, until the knuckles showed white.

"Do you know what I've a notion of doing?" she said.

"No; what?"

"I've a notion to go and work in a factory, say half a day, and give some poor girl a half-holiday."

"But you'd take her wages from her," said Marriott.

"Oh, I'd give her the wages."

Marriott shook his head slowly, doubtingly.

"I know it's impractical," Elizabeth went on. "Of course, I'd never do it. Why, people would think I'd gone crazy! Imagine what mama would say!"

She smiled at the absurdity.

"No," she said, "I'll have to go on, and lead my idle, useless life. That's what it is, Gordon." He saw the latent fires of indignation and protest leap into her eyes. "It's this life--this horrible, false, insane life! That's what it is! The poor boy is beside himself with it, and he doesn't know it. There is no place for him, nothing for him to do; it's the logic of events."

He was surprised to see such penetration in her.

"I've been thinking it out," she hurried to explain. "I've suffered from it myself. I've felt it for a long time, without understanding it, and I don't understand it very well now, but I'm beginning to. Of what use am I in the world? Not a bit--there isn't a single thing I can do. All this whole winter I've been going about to a lot of useless affairs, meeting and chattering with a lot of people who have no real life at all--who are of no more use in the world than I. I'm wearing myself out at it--and here I am, glad that the long, necessary waste of time is over--tired and sick, of this--this--sofa-pillow existence!" She thumped a silken pillow that lay on a long wicker divan beside her, thumped it viciously and with a hatred.

"Sometimes I feel that I'd like to leave the town and never see anybody in it again!" Elizabeth exclaimed. "Don't you?"

"Yes--but--"

"But what?"

"But is there any place where we could escape it all?"

"There must be some place--some place where we know no one, so that no one's cares could be our cares, where we could be mere disinterested spectators and sit aloof, and observe life, and not feel that it was any concern of ours at all. That's what I want. I'd like to escape this horrible ennui."

"Well, the summer's here and we can have our vacations. Of course," he added whimsically, "the Koerners will have no vacation."

"Gordon, don't you ever dare to mention the Koerners again!"

XIX

A few days later Eades and Marriott stood on a step at the Union Station, and watched the majestic Limited pull out for the east. The white-haired engineer in his faded blue jumper looked calmly down from the high window of his cab, the black porters grinned in the vestibule, the elderly conductor carrying his responsibilities seriously and unaffectedly, swung gracefully aboard, his watch in his hand, and there, on the observation platform, stood Elizabeth, very pretty in her gray gown and the little hat with the violets, Eades's flowers in one hand, Marriott's book in the other, waving her adieux. They watched her out of sight, and then Ward, standing beside them, sighed heavily.

"Well," he said, "it'll be lonesome now, with everybody out of town."

They waited for Dick, who alone of all of them had braved the high corporate authority at the gate, and gone with the travelers to their train. He came, and they went through the clamorous station to the street, where Dick's automobile was waiting, shaking as if it would shake itself to pieces. They rode down town in solemn silence. Eades and Marriott, indeed, had had little to say; during the strain of the parting moments with Elizabeth they had been stiff and formal with each other.

"I hope to get away myself next week," said Eades, "The town will soon be empty."

The city day was drawing to a close. Forge fires were glowing in the foundries they passed. Through the gloom within they could see the workmen, stripped like gunners to the waist, their moist, polished skins glowing in the fierce glare. They passed noisy machine-shops whence machinists glanced out at them. In some of the factories bevies of girls were thronging the windows, calling now and then to the workmen, who, for some reason earlier released from toil, were already trooping by on the sidewalk. In the crowded streets great patient horses nodded as they easily drew the empty trucks that had borne such heavy loads all day; their drivers were smoking pipes, greeting one another, and whistling or singing; one of them in the camaraderie of toil had taken on a load of workmen, to haul them on their homeward way. The street-cars were filled with men whose faces showed the grime their hasty washing had not removed.

Suddenly whistles blew, then there was a strange silence. Something like a sigh went up from all that quarter of the town.

The automobile was tearing through the tenderloin with its gaudily-painted saloons and second-hand stores sandwiched between. Old clothes fluttered above the sidewalk, and violins, revolvers, boxing-gloves and bits of jewelry, the trash and rubbish of wasted, feverish lives showed in the windows. Fat Jewish women sat in the doorways of pawn-shops, their swarthy children playing on the dirty sidewalk. In the swinging green doors of saloons stood bartenders; and everywhere groups of men and women, laughing, joking, haggling, scuffling and quarreling. Now and then girls with their tawdry finery tripped down from upper rooms, stood a moment in the dark, narrow doorways, looked up and down the street, and then suddenly went forth. In some of the cheap theaters, the miserable tunes that never ended, day or night, were jingling from metallic pianos. They passed on into the business district. Shops were closing, the tall office buildings, each a city in itself, were pouring forth their human contents; the sidewalks were thronged--everywhere life, swarming, seething life, spawned out upon the world.

BOOK II

I

All day long Archie Koerner and Curly Jackson had ridden in the empty box-car. They had made themselves as comfortable as they could, and had beguiled the time with talk and stories and cigarettes. Now and then they had fallen asleep, but not for long, for their joints ached with the jolting of the train, and, more than all else, there was a constant concern in their minds that made them restless, furtive and uneasy. The day was warm, and toward noon the sun beat down, hotter and hotter; the car was stifling, its atmosphere charged with the reminiscent odors of all the cargoes it had ever hauled. Long before daylight that morning they had crawled into the car as it stood on a siding in a village a hundred miles away. Just before dawn the train came, and they heard the conductor and brakeman moving about outside; now and then they caught the twinkle of their lanterns. Then the car was shunted and jolted back and forth for half an hour; finally the train was made up, and pulled out of the sleeping village they were so glad to get away from. With the coming of the dawn, they peeped out to see the sun come up over the fields. They watched the old miracle in silence until they saw a farmer coming across the field with a team. The farmer stopped, watched the train go by, then turned and began to plow corn.

"Pipe the Hoosier," Curly had said, the sight of a human being relieving the silence imposed by nature in her loneliness. "We call 'em suckers. He'll be plowing all day, but next winter he'll be sitting by a fire--and we'll--we'll be macing old women for lumps at the back doors."

Archie was not much affected by Curly's sarcastic philosophy; he had not yet attained to Curly's point of view.

Two days before, at evening, they had left the city and spent the first half of the night on foot, trudging along a country road; then a freight-train had taken them to a little town far to the south, where, in the small hours of the morning, they had broken into a post-office, blown open the safe with nitroglycerin, and taken out the stamps and currency. Curly considered the venture successful, though marred by one mishap: in the explosion the currency had been shattered and burned. But he had carefully gathered up the remnants, wrapped them in a paper, and stowed them away in his pocket with the stamps. The next day they hid in a wood. Curly made a fire, cooked bacon, and brewed tea in a tomato can, and these, with bread, had made a meal for them. Then he had carefully sorted the stamps, and had hidden in the ground all the five- and ten-cent stamps, preserving only those of the one- and two-cent denominations. After that he had lain down on the grass and slept.

While Curly slept, Archie sat and examined with an expert's loving interest and the fascination of a boy a new revolver he had stolen from a hardware store in the city three days before. Curly at first had opposed the theft of the revolver, but had finally consented because he recognized Archie's need; Archie had had no revolver since he was sent to the workhouse. The one he had when he was arrested had been confiscated--as it is called--by the police, and given by Bostwick to a friend, a lawyer who had long wanted a revolver to shoot burglars in case any should break into his home. Curly had consented to Archie's stealing the revolver, but he had commanded him to take nothing else, and had waited outside while Archie went into the hardware store. Archie had chosen a fine one, a double-acting, self-cocking revolver of thirty-eight caliber, like those carried by the police. He had been childishly happy in the possession of this weapon; he had taken it out and looked at it a hundred times, and had been tempted when they were alone in the woods to take a few practice shots, but when Curly ordered him not to think of such nonsense, he drew the cartridges, aimed at trees, twigs, birds, and snapped the trigger. Every little while in the box-car that day he had taken it out, looked at it, caressed it, turned it over in his palm, delicately tested its weight, and called Curly to admire it with him. He thought much more of the revolver than he did of the stamps and blasted currency they had stolen, and Curly had spoken sharply to him at last and said:

"If you don't put up that rod, I'll ditch it for you."

Archie obeyed Curly, but when he had restored the revolver to his pocket, he continued to talk of it, and then of other weapons he had owned, and he told Curly how he had won the sharp-shooter's medal in the army.

But finally, in his weariness, Archie lost interest even in his new revolver, and when Curly would not let him go to the door of the car and look out, lest the trainmen should see them and force them into an encounter, Archie had fallen asleep in a corner.

It was a relief to Curly when Archie went to sleep, for in addition to his joy in his revolver, Archie had been excited over their adventure. Curly was in many ways peculiar; he was inclined to be secretive; he frequently worked alone, and his operations were as much a mystery to his companions and to Gibbs as they were to the police. He had had his eye on the little post-office at Trenton for months; it had called to him, as it were, to come and rob it. It had advantages, the building was old; an entrance could be effected easily. He had stationed Archie outside to watch while he knocked off the peter, and Archie had acquitted himself to Curly's satisfaction. The affair came off smoothly. Though it was in the short summer night, no one had been abroad; they got away without molestation. Now, as they drew near the city, Curly felt easy.

Late in the afternoon Curly saw signs of the city's outposts--the side-tracks were multiplying in long lines of freight-cars. Then Curly wakened Archie, and when the train slowed up, they dropped from the car.

It was good to feel once more their feet on the ground, to walk and stretch their tired, numb muscles, good to breathe the open air and, more than all, good to see the city looming under its pall of smoke. They joined the throngs of working-men; and they might have passed for working-men themselves, for Curly wore overalls, as he always did on his expeditions, and they were both so black from the smoke and cinders of their journey, that one might easily have mistaken their grime for that of honest toil.

They came to the river, pressed up the long approach to its noble bridge, and submerged themselves in the stream of life that flowed across it, the stream that was made up of all sorts of people--working-men, clerks, artisans, shop-girls, children, men and women, the old and the young, each individual with his burden or his care or his secret guilt, his happiness, his hope, his comedy or his tragedy, losing himself in the mass, merging his identity in the crowd, doing his part to make the great epic of life that flowed across the bridge as the great river flowed under it--the stream in which no one could tell the good from the bad, or even wish thus to separate them, in which no one could tell Archie or Curly from the teacher of a class in a Sunday-school. Here on the bridge man's little distinctions were lost and people were people merely, bound together by the common possession of good and bad intentions, of good and bad deeds, of frailties, errors, sorrows, sufferings and mistakes, of fears and doubts, of despairs, of hopes and triumphs and heroisms and victories and boundless dreams.

Beside them rumbled a long procession of trucks and wagons and carriages, street-cars moved in yellow procession, ringing their cautionary gongs; the draw in the middle of the bridge vibrated under the tread of all those marching feet; its three red lights were already burning overhead. Far below, the river, growing dark, rolled out to the lake; close to its edge on the farther shore could be descried, after long searching of the eye, the puffs of white smoke from crawling trains; vessels could be picked out, tugs and smaller craft, great propellers that bore coal and ore and lumber up and down the lakes; here and there a white passenger-steamer, but all diminutive in the long perspective. Above them the freight-depots squatted; above these elevators lifted themselves, and then, as if on top of them, the great buildings of the city heaved themselves as by some titanic convulsive effort in a lofty pile, surmounted by the high office buildings in the center, with here and there towers and spires striking upward from the jagged sky-line. All this pile was in a neutral shade of gray,--lines, details, distinctions, all were lost; these huge monuments of man's vanity, or greed, or ambition, these expressions of his notions of utility or of beauty, were heaped against a smoky sky, from which the light was beginning to fade. Somewhere, hidden far down in this mammoth pile, among all the myriads of people that swarmed and lost themselves below it, were Gusta and Dick Ward, old man Koerner and Marriott, Modderwell and Danner, Bostwick and Parrish, and Danny Gibbs, and Mason, and Eades, but they were lost in the mass of human beings--the preachers and thieves, the doctors and judges, and aldermen, and merchants, and working-men, and social leaders, and prostitutes--who went to make up the swarm of people that crawled under and through this pile of iron and stone, thinking somehow that the distinctions and the grades they had fashioned in their little minds made them something more or something less than what they really were.

II

And yet, after having crossed the bridge in the silence that was the mysterious effect of the descent of evening over the city, after having been gathered back again for a few moments into human relations with their fellow mortals, Archie and Curly became thieves again. This change in them occurred when they saw two policemen standing at the corner of High Street, where the crowd from the bridge, having climbed the slope of River Street, began to flow in diverging lines this way and that. The change was the more marked in Archie, for at sight of the policemen he stopped suddenly.

"Look!" he whispered.

"Come on!" commanded Curly, and Archie fell into step. "You never want to halt that way; it don't make any difference with harness bulls, but if a fly dick was around, it might put him hip."

It was a relief to Archie when at last they turned into Danny Gibbs's; the strange shrinking sensation he had felt in the small of his back, the impulse to turn around, the starting of his heart at each footfall behind him, now disappeared. It was quiet at Gibbs's; the place was in perfect order; in the window by the door, under the bill which pictured two pugilists, the big cat he had seen now and then slinking about the place was curled in sleep; and two little kittens were playing near her. At one of the tables, his head bowed in his hands, was the wreck of a man Archie had so often seen in that same attitude and in that same place--the table indeed seemed to be used for no other purpose. Gibbs himself was there, in shirt-sleeves, leaning over the evening paper he had spread before him on his bar. He was freshly shaven, and was reading his paper and smoking his cigar in the peace that had settled on his establishment; his shirt was fresh and clean; the starch was scarcely broken in its stiff sleeves, and Archie was fascinated by the tiny red figures of horseshoes and stirrups and jockey caps that dotted it; he had a desire to possess, some day, just such a shirt himself. At the approaching step of the two men, Gibbs looked up suddenly, and the light flashed blue from the diamond in the bosom of his shirt. Curly jerked his head toward the back room. Gibbs looked at Curly an instant and then at Archie, a question in his glance.

"Sure," said Curly; "he's in." Then Gibbs carefully and deliberately folded his paper, stuck it in one of the brackets of his bar, and went with the two men into the back room. There he stood beside the table, his hands thrust into his pockets, his cigar rolling in the corner of his mouth, his head tilted back a little. Archie was tingling with interest and expectation.

"Well," said Gibbs, in an introductory way.

Curly was unbuttoning his waistcoat; in a moment he had drawn from its inner pocket a package, unwrapped it, and disclosed the sheets of fresh new stamps, red and green, and stiff with the shining mucilage. He counted them over laboriously and separated them, making two piles, one of the red two-cent stamps, another of the green one-cent stamps, while Gibbs stood, squinting downward at the table. When Curly was done, Gibbs counted the sheets of postage stamps himself.

"Just fifty of each, heh?" he asked when he had done.

"That's right," said Curly.

"That's right, is it?" Gibbs repeated; a shrewdness in his squint.

"Yes," Curly said.

"Sixty per cent.," said Gibbs.

"All right," said Curly.

"I can't give more for the stickers just now," Gibbs went on, as if the men were entitled to some word of explanation; "business is damned bad, and I'm not making much at that."

"That's all right," said Curly somewhat impatiently, as one who disliked haggling.

"That goes with you, does it, Dutch?" Gibbs said to Archie.

"Sure," said Archie, glancing hastily at Curly, "whatever he says goes with me all right." And then he smiled, his white teeth showing, his face ruddier, his blue eyes sparkling with the excitement he felt--smiled at this new name Gibbs had suddenly given him.

Curly had thrust his hand into another pocket meanwhile, and he drew out another package, done up in a newspaper. He laid this on the table, opened it slowly, and carefully turning back the folds of paper, disclosed the bundle of charred bank-notes. Gibbs began shaking his head dubiously as soon as he saw the contents.

"I can't do much with that," he said. "But you leave it and I'll see."

"Well, now, that's all right," said Curly, speaking in his high argumentative tone; "I ain't wolfing. You can give us our bit later."

"All right," said Gibbs, and carefully doing up the parcels, he took them and disappeared. In a few moments he came back, counted out the money on the table--ninety dollars--and then went out with the air of a man whose business is finished.

Curly divided the money, gave Archie his half, and they went out. The bar-room was just as they had left it; the wreck of a man still bowed his head on his forearms, the cat was still curled about her kittens. Gibbs had taken down his paper, and resumed his reading.

"I'm going to get a bath and a shave," Curly said. He passed his hand over his chin, rasping its palm on the stubble of his beard. Archie was surprised and a little disappointed at the hint of dismissal he felt in Curly's tone. He wished to continue the companionship, with its excitement, its interest, its pleasure, above all that quality in it which sustained him and kept up his spirits. He found himself just then in a curious state of mind; the distinction he had felt but a few moments before in the back room with Gibbs, the importance in the success of the expedition, more than all, the feeling that he had been admitted to relationships which so short a time before had been so mysterious and inaccessible to him,--all this was leaving him, dying out within, as the stimulus of spirits dies out in a man, and Archie's Teutonic mind was facing the darkness of a fit of despondency; he felt blue and unhappy; he longed to stay with Curly.

"Look at, Dutch," Curly was saying; "you've got a little of the cush now--it ain't much, but it's something. You want to go and give some of it to your mother; don't go and splash it up in beer."

It pleased Archie to have Curly call him Dutch. There was something affectionate in it, as there is in most nicknames--something reassuring. But the mention of his mother overcame this sense; it unmanned him, and he looked away.

"And look at," Curly was going on, "you'll bit up on that burned darb; you be around in a day or two."

Curly withdrew into himself in the curious, baffling way he had; the way that made him mysterious and somewhat superior, and, at times, brought on him the distrust of his companions, always morbidly suspicious at their best. Archie disliked to step out of Gibbs's place into the street; it seemed like an exposure. He glanced out. The summer twilight had deepened into darkness. The street was deserted and bare, though the cobblestones somehow exuded the heat and turmoil of the day that had just passed from them. Archie thought for an instant of what Curly had said about his mother; he could see her as she would be sitting in the kitchen, with the lamp on the table; Gusta would be bustling about getting the supper, the children moving after her, clutching at her skirts, retarding her, getting in her way, seeming to endanger their own lives by scalding and burning and falling and other domestic accidents, which, though always impending, never befell. The kitchen would be full of the pleasant odor of frying potatoes, and the coffee, bubbling over now and then and sizzling on the hot stove--Archie had a sense of all these things, and his heart yearned and softened. And then suddenly he thought of his father, and he knew that the conception of the home he had just had was the way it used to be before his father lost his leg and all the ills following that accident had come upon the family; the house was no longer cheerful; the smell of boiling coffee was not in it as often as it used to be; his mother was depressed and his father quarrelsome, even Gusta had changed; he would be sure to encounter that lover of hers, that plumber whom he hated. He squeezed the roll of bills in his pocket; suddenly, too, he remembered his new revolver and pressed it against his thigh, and he had pleasure in that. He went out into the street. After all, the darkness was kind; there were glaring and flashing electric lights along the street, of course; the cheap restaurant across the way was blazing, people were drifting in and out, but they were not exactly the same kind of people in appearance that had thronged the streets by day. There was a new atmosphere--a more congenial atmosphere, for night had come, and had brought a change and a new race of people to the earth--a race that lived and worked by night, with whom Archie felt a kinship. He did not hate them as he was unconsciously growing to hate the people of the daylight. He saw a lame hot-tamale man in white, hobbling up the street, painfully carrying his steaming can; he saw cabmen on their cabs down toward Cherokee Street; he saw two girls, vague, indistinct, suggestive, flitting hurriedly by in the shadows; the electric lights were blazing with a hard fierce glare, but there were shadows, deep and black and soft. He started toward Cherokee Street; he squeezed the money in his pocket; he was somehow elated with the independence it gave him. At the corner he paused again; he had no plan, he was drifting along physically just as he was morally, following the line of least resistance, which line, just then, was marked by the lights along Market Place. He started across that way, when all at once a hand took him by the lapel of his coat and Kouka's black visage was before him. Archie looked at the detective, whose eyes were piercing him from beneath the surly brows that met in thick, coarse, bristling hairs across the wide bridge of his nose.

"Well," said Kouka, "so I've got you again!"

Archie's heart came to his throat. A great rage suddenly seized him, a hatred of Kouka, and of his black eyes; he had a savage wish to grind the heel of his boot heavily, viciously, remorselessly into that face, right there where the eyebrows met across the nose--grinding his heel deep, feeling the bones crunch beneath it. For some reason Kouka suddenly released his hold.

"You'd better duck out o' here, young fellow," Kouka was saying. "You hear?"

Archie heard, but it was a moment before he could fully realize that Kouka knew nothing after all.

"You hear?" Kouka repeated, bringing his face close to Archie's.

"Yes, I hear," said Archie sullenly, as it seemed, but thankfully.

"Don't let me see you around any more, you--"

Archie, saved by some instinct, did not reply, and he did not wait for Kouka's oath, but hurried away, and Kouka, as he could easily feel, stood watching him. He went on half a block and paused in a shadow. He saw Kouka still standing there, then presently saw him turn and go away.

Archie paused in the shadow; he thought of Kouka, remembering all the detective had done to him; he remembered those forty days in the workhouse; he thought of Bostwick, of the city attorney, of the whole town that seemed to stand behind him; the bitterness of those days in the workhouse came back, and the force of all the accumulated hatred and vengeance that had been spent upon him was doubled and quadrupled in his heart, and he stood there with black, mad, insane thoughts clouding his reason. Then he gripped his roll of money, he pressed his new revolver, and he felt a kind of wild, primitive, savage satisfaction,--the same primitive satisfaction that Kouka, and Bostwick, the city attorney, the whole police force, and the whole city had seemed to take in sending him to the workhouse. And then he went on toward the tenderloin.

III

Gibbs, never sure that the police would keep their word with him, rose earlier than usual the next morning, ate his breakfast, called a cab--he had an eccentric fondness for riding about in hansom-cabs--and was driven rapidly to the corner of High and Franklin Streets, the busiest, most distracting corner in the city. There the enormous department store of James E. Bills and Company occupied an entire building five stories high. The store was already filled with shoppers, mostly women, who crowded about the counters, on which all kinds of trinkets were huddled, labeled with cards declaring that the price had just been reduced. The girls behind the counters, all of whom were dressed in a certain extravagant imitation of the women who came every day to look these articles over, were already tired; their eyes lay in dark circles that were the more pronounced because their cheeks were covered with powder, and now and then they lifted their hands, their highly polished finger-nails gleaming, to the enormous pompadours in which they had arranged their hair. Many of the women in the store, clerks and shoppers, wore peevish, discontented expressions, and spoke in high ugly voices; the noise of their haggling filled the whole room and added to the din made by the little metal money-boxes that whizzed by on overhead wires, and increased the sense of confusion produced by the cheap and useless things which, with their untruthful placards, were piled about everywhere. The air in the store was foul and unwholesome; here and there pale little girls who carried bundles in baskets ran about on their little thin legs, piping out shrill numbers.

Gibbs was wearied the moment he entered, and irritably waved aside the sleek, foppish floor-walker. The only person to whom he spoke as he passed along was a private detective leaning against one of the counters; Gibbs had already had dealings with him and had got back for him articles that had been stolen by certain women thieves who were adept in the art of shoplifting. Gibbs went straight back to the elevator and was lifted out of all this din and confusion into the comparative quiet of the second floor, where the offices of the establishment occupied a cramped space behind thin wooden partitions. Gibbs entered the offices and glanced about at the clerks, who worked in silence; on each of them had been impressed a subdued, obedient demeanor; they glanced at Gibbs surreptitiously. It was plain that all spirit had been drilled out of them; they were afraid of something, and, driven by their necessities, they toiled like machines. Gibbs felt a contempt for them as great as the contempt he felt for the floor-walkers below, a contempt almost as great as that he had for Bills himself. A timid man of about forty-five, with a black beard sprouting out of the pallor of his skin, came up, and lifted his brows with amazement when Gibbs, ignoring him, made plainly for the door that was lettered: "Mr. Bills."

"Mr. Bills is engaged just now," the man said in a hushed tone.

"Well, tell him Mr. Gibbs is here."

"But he's engaged just now, sir; he's dictating." The man leaned forward and whispered the word "dictating" impressively.

But Gibbs kept on toward the door; then the man blocked his way.

"Tell him if you want to," said Gibbs, "if not, I will."

It seemed that Gibbs might walk directly through the man, who retreated from him, and, having no other egress, went through Mr. Bills's door. A moment more and he held it open for Gibbs.

Bills was sitting at an enormous desk which was set in perfect order; on either side of him were baskets containing the letters he was methodically answering. Bills's head showed over the top of the desk; it was a round head covered with short black hair, smoothly combed and shining. His black side-whiskers were likewise short and smooth. His neck was bound by a white collar and a little pious, black cravat, and he wore black clothes. His smoothly-shaven lips were pursed in a self-satisfied way; he was brisk and unctuous, very clean and proper, and looked as if he devoutly anointed himself with oil after his bath. In a word, he bore himself as became a prominent business man, who, besides his own large enterprise, managed a popular Sunday-school, and gave Sunday afternoon "talks" on "Success," for the instruction of certain young men of the city, too mild and acquiescent to succeed as anything but conformers.

"Ah, Mr. Gibbs," he said. "You will excuse me a moment."

Bills turned and resumed the dictation of his stereotyped phrases of business. He dictated several letters, then dismissed his stenographer and, turning about, said with a smile:

"Now, Mr. Gibbs."

Gibbs drew his chair close to Bills's desk, and, taking a package from his pocket, laid out the stamps.

"One hundred sheets of twos, fifty of ones," he said.

Bills had taken off his gold glasses and slowly lowered them to the end of their fine gold chain; he rubbed the little red marks the glasses left on the bridge of his nose, and in his manner there was an uncertainty that seemed unexpected by Gibbs.

"I was about to suggest, Mr. Gibbs," said Bills, placing his fingers tip to tip, "that you see our Mr. Wilson; he manages the mail-order department, now."

"Not for mine," said Gibbs decisively. "I've always done business with you. I don't know this fellow Wilson."

Bills, choosing to take it as a tribute, smiled and went on:

"I think we're fully stocked just now, but--how would a sixty per cent. proposition strike you?"

"No," said Gibbs, as decisively as before.

"No?" repeated Bills.

"No," Gibbs went on, "seventy-five."

Bills thought a moment, absently lifting the rustling sheets.

"How many did you say there were?"

"They come to one-fifty," said Gibbs; "count 'em."

Bills did count them, and when he had done, he said:

"That would make it one-twelve-fifty?"

"That's it."

"Very well. Shall I pass the amount to your credit?"

"No; I'll take the cash."

"I thought perhaps Mrs. Gibbs would be wanting some things in the summer line," said Bills.

Gibbs shook his head.

"We pay cash," said he.

Bills smiled, got up, walked briskly with a little spring to each step and left the room. He returned presently, closed the door, sat down, counted the bills out on the leaf of his desk, laid a silver half-dollar on top and said:

"There you are."

Gibbs counted the money carefully, rolled it up deliberately and stuffed it into his trousers pocket.

Gibbs had one more errand that morning, and he drove in his hansom-cab to the private bank Amos Hunter conducted as a department of his trust company. Gibbs deposited his money, and then went into Hunter's private office. Hunter was an old man, thin and spare, with white hair, and a gray face. He sat with his chair turned away from his desk, which he seldom used except when it became necessary for him to sign his name, and then he did this according to the direction of a clerk, who would lay a paper before him, dip a pen in ink, hand it to Hunter, and point to the space for the signature. Hunter was as economical of his energy in signing his name as in everything else; he wrote it "A. Hunter." He sat there every day without moving, as it seemed, apparently determined to eke out his life to the utmost. His coachman drove him down town at ten each morning, at four in the afternoon he came and drove him home again. It was only through the windows of the carriage and through the windows of his private office that Hunter looked out on a world with which for forty years he had never come in personal contact. His inert manner gave the impression of great age and senility; but the eyes under the thick white brows were alert, keen, virile. He was referred to generally as "old Amos."

Gibbs went in, a parcel in his hand.

"Just a little matter of some mutilated currency," he said.

Old Amos's thin lips seemed to smile.

"You may leave it and we'll be glad to forward it to Washington for you, Mr. Gibbs," he said, without moving.

Gibbs laid the bundle on old Amos's desk, and, taking up a bit of paper, wrote on it and handed it to Hunter.

"Have you a memorandum there?" asked Hunter. He glanced at the paper and wrote on the slip:

"A. H."

Then he resumed the attitude that had scarcely been altered, laid his white hands in his lap and sat there with his thin habitual smile.

Gibbs thanked him and went away. His morning's work among the business men of the city was done.

IV

It promised to be a quiet evening at Danny Gibbs's. There had been a vicious electrical storm that afternoon, but by seven o'clock the lightning played prettily in the east, the thunder rolled away, the air cooled, and the rain fell peacefully. The storm had been predicted to Joe Mason in the rheumatism that had bitten his bones for two days, but now the ache had ceased, and the relief was a delicious sensation he was content simply to realize. He sat in the back room, smoking and thinking, a letter in his hand. Gibbs's wife had gone to bed--she had been drinking that day. Old Johnson, the sot who, by acting as porter, paid Gibbs for his shelter and the whisky he drank--he ate very little, going days at a time without food--had set the bar-room in order and disappeared. Gibbs was somewhere about, but all was still, and Mason liked it so. From time to time Mason glanced at the letter. The letter was a fortnight old; it had been written from a workhouse in a distant city by his old friend Dillon, known to the yeggs as Slim. Mason had not seen Dillon for a year--not, in fact, since they had been released from Dannemora. This was the letter:

OLD PAL--I thought I would fly you a kite, and take chances of its safe arrival at your loft. I was lagged wrong, but I am covered and strong and the bulls can't throw me. I am only here for a whop, and I'll hit the road before the dog is up. I have filled out a country jug that can be sprung all right. We can make a safe lamas. There is a John O'Brien at 1:30 A. M., and a rattler at 3:50. The shack next door is a cold slough, and the nearest kip to the joint is one look and a peep. There is a speeder in the shanty, and we can get to the main stem and catch the rattler and be in the main fort by daylight. The trick is easy worth fifty centuries. Now let me know, and make your mark and time. I am getting this out through a broad who will give it to our fall-back, you know who.