CHAPTER THREE
I SAT on the park bench, thinking it all over. I sat there in the paling light, with the distant hum of the city in my ears, going over those earlier days, scene by scene and event by event.
A little old man in rusty black ambled by me, but he had come and gone before my abstracted eyes took note of him. The gray squirrel ventured back to his earlier playground, circling discreetly about the stranger who was in too deep a trance to remember that it was about time for the handing out of a peanut or two. But I was thinking of bigger things than park squirrels as I sat there with a five-reeled tangle that people call life once more unrolling before my eyes. I was busy recalling how that meeting with the Hero-Man changed me, and changed even Bud Griswold. For Bud's manner toward me, after that strange evening at Long Beach, was distinctly a different one. He was, I could see, secretly and smolderingly jealous of the mysterious and cool-eyed Wendy Washburn. He knew that this stranger had opened my eyes to things which they had never before bothered about. I didn't explain. I couldn't explain. But in some vague way I felt sorry for Bud. He became more morose, more self-contained. Yet he was never openly unkind, or actively critical. He seemed more discontented with himself than with me. A new fever for money seemed to possess him. This prompted him to turn back to the coarser grades of work, to take chances which earlier in the game he never seemed to care to face.
Yet in some ways he tried to stay the same. He remained the same toward me, although his temper, with other people, was apt to be uncertain. It was at Ormond Beach, I remembered, that he floored a Yacht-Johnny in white ducks for making unseemly advances to me on the board-walk, knocked him as flat as a pan-cake, and at the same time put the kibosh on our hotel coup for that night, because a federal gum-shoe pushed in through the crowd and got a bead on Bud. He seemed to remember him. So we had to beat a retreat for the orange-groves before two local constables could understand why that gum-shoe was trying to commit an assault on such a respectable-looking guest as Bud.
And in Brookline, when Copperhead Kate led Bud to one side and tried to coax him to hitch up with a mail-pouch thief called Pawtucket Fatty, he shook his head on the strong-arm work. It was the same when Hot-Weather Harry, another porch-climber who'd side-stepped into yegg-work, wanted Bud to join him and work the can-opener on the Middle West post-offices. Bud came out flat against the offer. He later explained to me that it was rube work and all right for the rough-necks, though it wasn't until later that I learned that both Copperhead Kate and Hot-Weather Harry claimed that I was the reason for Bud Griswold growing chicken-hearted in his old age.
If this worried Bud he never opened his heart about it to me. He merely contended that he'd rather be a check-kiter, or a stone-getter, any day, than a soup-worker and a box-blower. For Bud didn't believe in force. He made it a practise not even to carry a gun. This, he pointed out, had saved him from a fall, dozens of times. He said no properly-trained supper-worker had any right to tote a "gat," which is the underworld word for an automatic. He didn't even work with a jimmy, when it came to forcing a side door, or getting a back window up. All he carried was a specially made cigar-lighter—which served him as a flashlight—and a cast-steel stove-lifter which could be tossed into any back yard on a moment's notice. You couldn't hold a man, he used to say, on an exhibit of kitchen utensils, though he worked a good many of his window tricks with a stone point and a suction-cap made from a glove-back.
Copperhead Kate dogged about after Bud a good deal that summer, and on a pretense that a run of hard luck had slimmed our heel we worked south from Boston to Sleepy-Town again, skipping New York as usual and striking for the high-toned colonies along the Eastern Coast. I wasn't sorry to be on the move, for I was more than ever afraid of Copperhead Kate. And I could see that Bud himself was restless. He knew that something had started me thinking things over, that I was no longer as placidly unconcerned about life as a lamb in a meadow, that I was beginning to have an inkling that the whole arrangement of things was wrong. But he worked steadily, all this time, and never lost a chance to turn the nut, as he would express it. And when winter came on we struck for Florida and floated down through the East Coast resorts, Little Me drifting ahead as the advance agent and Bud following on as the managing director. We never put up at the same hotel, of course, and we never appeared together in public unless it couldn't be helped.
For the first time in my life I was lonesome, lonesome for something which I couldn't name and couldn't understand. But Bud was always talking of the future, when we came together, and of the deep heel we'd have when we crossed the pond. It was at Fort Pierce that he first asked me to marry him, though he did it again, three days later, at Palm Beach. I was able to laugh at him, and accuse him of getting mealy. That seemed to hurt him. It at least put the lid down on the marriage talk for the rest of the winter. But Bud was good to me, as good as any man, whether he happened to be a diamond thief or a churchwarden, could be to a woman. He still expected me to do my spotter work, of course, and do it well. Sometimes it wasn't easy to get away with, but Bud, even from the distance, watched me like a hawk and never ventured a move which he thought would make it harder for me.
I don't like to say that Bud went sour that winter, but my refusal to marry him left him so unsettled that he did the best sloughing of the season, sometimes making three stations in one night. He even jimmied his way into a stucco château full of King Charles spaniels, and, take my word for it, no ordinary porch-climber is ever anxious to face that kind of dog-opera. Then when things shaped themselves so it looked like a round-up, he commandeered a gasoline launch and we did the Indian River by moonlight, with Bud dropping in on a nifty-looking house-boat on the way and gathering up a pocketful of rings before a trim little tender full of fox-trotters bumped up against one end of that boat while Bud himself slipped down over the other.
Then we doubled back and ambled on to Havana, where Bud reported the city to be a gold-mine for work like his, but where I suffered from intermittent chills and fever until an American doctor advised me to go north. So Bud gave up his gold-mine and carried me back to home country by way of New Orleans. Then we headed northward by way of St. Louis and Chicago, for Bud had worked out a new coup or two, to practise in the neighborhood of the Great Lakes.
One of his new plans, in which he had great faith, he intended to try out at Detroit, and then repeat at Buffalo, if all went well. His idea was to plant me in one of the Pullmans crossing the Line. Then, watching his chance, he was to board the train, pull on a gold-braided cap, and pose as an immigration official. He intended to come to me first, close to the end of the car, and ask if I was an American or a Canadian citizen, and what money I carried. My part of the play was to hand over a phony roll, for which he'd give me a duly-prepared official receipt, with the announcement that the money would be returned to me at Windsor, or at Buffalo, as the case happened to be. Then he'd go down the line, gathering in all he could. I was to be both a stick-up and a come-on, of course, for when the others saw me pass over my cash in hand they'd conclude a genuine immigration officer was on the job and a new inland revenue regulation was being put in force. In case anything suspicious happened, I was to throw Bud the high-sign. But if all went well he could stow his gold-braided cap, drop off the Pullman, and repeat the coup on any train that happened to be moving in the opposite direction.
It could be worked only once, Bud explained, but it ought to make good picking while it lasted. In explaining this Bud told me how he'd made almost as good money at the same points, working out a coup of baggage-check switching. He'd check a trunk full of cheap clothes from some Canadian point, go through to the baggage-car at the border, and have the trunk examined and passed. Then he'd tarry to strap it up. If he got a minute or two alone in that car he made it a point to pick out the most promising trunk and switch claim-checks between it and his own. His own claim-check, at the end of the trip, would call for the good trunk, a transfer company would deliver it at a flivver address, and Bud would move on as soon as it came, without leaving too many traces as he went.
The new coup, Bud claimed, was the better of the two. And he was glad to get to Detroit to try it out. He was as interested in it, in fact, as a Belasco would be in a new production. But that particular performance never got to the footlights. For it was at Detroit that poor old Bud got his fall.
I was cooped at the Stattler, and Bud was holding out at the Pontchetrain. He'd sidetracked there for a day, working out a slough against a Grosse Pointe automobile nabob who'd made half a million out of war munitions and was trying to spend the most of it in one dinner orgy. He was just laying the last ropes when Shy Sadie Driscoll blew into Bud's kennel and invited him to swing in with her on a turn of the old panel game with some new trimmings. Bud "threw her flat" as she put it. Shy Sadie tried to wipe out that throw-down by blowing the tout and having a fancy cop walk in on Bud when he was pretty anxious to be alone. But they had him with the goods on. The best he could do was to save me out of the ruins. He lied like a trooper, through three hours of third-degreeing, just to save my scalp. At the very first move he'd thrown me the high-sign not to recognize him, not to know him, not to be interested in him, I caught the cue, and stuck to it. And to Shy Sadie's mortification, I made good on it. But it hurt, even to have to play out that part of giving my old running-mate the cold shoulder.
It hurt me a lot more, though, not being able to get near the man who needed me more than ever before. But Bud commanded me to stand clear. He said It was the only way. He seemed to know what was coming. And it came sooner than I imagined. It was a railroad case, a through trip and no stops. They gave him Jackson for ten years.
He sent me word, later on, that he wanted to see me. He explained that the case against him was closed and that there'd be no risk in the visit.
So I went up to Jackson by the interurban. It was my first glimpse of a state penitentiary. I'd never even glimpsed the inside of a county jail. I'd never dreamed what it was that had been standing, all the while, just one turn of the road ahead of me. But that first glimpse of stir suddenly opened my eyes. I beheld a living tomb, and the horror of it, the hopelessness of it, struck deep, like a knife, into my heart
I tried to hide this horror during my long talk with Bud, but it was no use. Bud even tried to make me see the thing in a different light, and explained that Jackson was one of the best pens in the Union, and that, on the whole, he was lucky to be in a place where he'd get such all-round good treatment and so many chances for a commutation. But Bud had something more than his own troubles to talk about.
"Kid," he asked me, "what's the size of your roll?"
It had slimmed down to a couple of tens, and I told him so.
Then he sat studying my face.
"Well, I've been thinking about this for a long time. I could see there was always a chance of it coming. And I've gathered the gazabos to have you taken care of!"
"But I want you to take care of me," I told him.
He shook his head. "They've got me here—and ten years is a long time!"
The thought of it made me wild.
"But I'll get you out of here. I'll get the best mouth-piece in the profession. I'll pump brine over that governor until I wash a pardon out of his system!"
Bud only laughed, though there wasn't much happiness in that laugh.
"I'm here, honey-girl, and here I've got to stay. That's not what I'm worrying about. It's you I've got on my mind just now. And I want to do the right thing by you, kid."
"What can you do?" I asked, studying his heavy face.
"I'm going to try and square myself for hauling you down the way I did. I'm going to give you a chance at the other kind of living."
"I never kicked against this way of living," I told him, looking him straight in the eye. But there were certain things which I couldn't help remembering, although, at the moment, I was ashamed of it.
"That's just what's wrong," Bud told me. "We've both been blind to things you can't afford to side-step. And now, Baddie, you've got to get busy and have your eyes opened!"
He was so solemn that he frightened me. And I was busy wondering what he could be holding back on me.
"The first thing I want to do is get you over on the other side of the line. I'll never feel safe with you here in the States, though God knows I did what I could to keep you clear of everything. And I don't want to think there'd ever be a chance of your facing what I've got to face."
The terror of those long black years, stretching out endlessly, one after the other, and one as empty as the other, suddenly gripped my soul. But Bud made an impatient sign with his hand, for it was plain he hated to see me cry. Then he went on again.
"Baddie, you were born with brains, and you're going to have two or three years' living among the right sort of people."
"No, I'm not," I promptly told him. "I've tried it. And the right sort of people always seemed the wrong people with me."
"That's just what I've been trying to tell you. You're going to have your eyes opened. You're going to learn how wrong you've been looking at everything!"
For a moment I thought he'd roped me in for a reform school or one of those penal farms where you grow vegetables beside a man with a pump-gun. And my heart sank.
"It's all fixed up and settled," explained patient-eyed old Bud. "For I thought this out a long time before yesterday. And you're going to have a couple of years of peace and progress in an Ursuline academy called The Pines."
"Where's that?" I demanded, getting ready to back right out of the harness.
"That's about fifty miles across the border, up in Canada. And you're going to learn a lot up there that I'd never be able to teach you. And after a while you're going to like it."
I sat looking at him.
"I'd hate it," I finally announced.
Bud only shook his head.
"You're going to have a little white room with ivy all around the window. You're going to have a clean white bed and clean people to live with. You're going to hear birds sing, and bells ring—and a different line of talk than big-mitter's slang. You're going to study music and sewing and deportment and have morning and evening chapel, and big trees to sit under, and rows of flowers to walk between, and real women to talk over your troubles with. And after the first week or two, when you get over the wrench, you're going to wake up and find that the quiet lives aren't always the empty ones."
I still sat there staring at him. For a minute or two I actually thought that stir had made him squirrely.
"But I don't want it," I cried out at him. "I won't take it. I'd rather be here with you than in a place like that!"
Bud smiled, even though his eyes were haggard. Then he sobered up again.
"I'd rather see you screwed down in your coffin than ever come into this sort of a place," he told me. "And for the next year or two you can't stay loose this side of the line. It's all paid for and settled, that new berth of yours, I've seen to that. And if you ever thought anything of me you'll take the chance that I'm trying to give you."
"Why do you say that?" I asked, struggling in vain to keep my face straight.
"Because it'll make things easier for me here, knowing I'm trying to square for what I did to you!"
And that, I remembered, was how I came to go up to the Ursuline academy.
It wasn't exactly the same as stir, but, at first, it seemed almost as bad to me. I don't know what kept me from going crazy. When I tried a breakaway, at the end of the third week, they got me back before I could board a Wabash train for the Falls, got me back the same as though I'd been a lifter in an up-state reformatory.
I went back, but it began to make me bitter toward Bud. I secretly accused him of trying to hand me a dose of his own medicine. I even wondered if he wasn't simply trying to save me for himself, if he wasn't merely maneuvering to keep me in pickle there until he could rope a reprieve and come and carry me off. For I seemed to be in a world of sleep-walkers. They were all so quiet-voiced and sedate and so far away from my busy old world of noise. It even took Sister Theresa three days to teach me how to sit down in a chair. I'd done it wrong, all my life, without knowing it. And I had to do without my face-powder, and cut out the slang, and learn how to pitch my voice and face lights-out at nine o'clock—at nine o'clock, and Little Me the night-owl who used to hit the hay when the milk-wagons were rattling up from the ferry-slips! There were a lot of other things I had to learn, though I didn't seem to know it at the time. There was a change taking place, though I couldn't see it.
It wasn't until Copperhead Kate came to see me at The Pines that I realized how great this change already was. She came heavily veiled, and dressed all in black, and she carried herself as discreetly as though she were under the eyes of twenty elbows at once. But I could feel the difference. She was snaky and brazen and hard, and all her affectations of gentility struck me as grotesque. She told me that Bud's health was bad at Jackson, and that we ought to do something to get him out. I hated her more than ever, not only because I felt she had come to spy on me, but also because she could still speak of Bud Griswold with such a proprietary air. I think she envied me, and was glad of anything that would make me miserable. She went away saying she'd be glad to carry any message I cared to send in to Bud, and left me a Saginaw address to send it to.
I thought about Bud a great deal, the next week or two. I worried over him. It was only on the last Saturday of every month that we were allowed out, always with one of the Sisters. I had grown friendlier with Sister Angelica than with any of the others, for we both loved candy, and often, in the recreation rooms, ate a little box of smuggled chocolates together. On the next Saturday out, instead of being in the dentist's chair where I was supposed to be, I bought a pound of Canadian maple-sugar and in Wanless' hardware store came Into possession of a twelve-inch hack-saw blade of the finest tempered steel. It was so finely tempered that back in my room I was able to coil it up like a watch-spring, and wire it together with a couple of hairpins. Then I melted down about half of my maple-sugar over an alcohol-lamp and poured it into a round soap-dish. Before it hardened I dropped the coiled-up saw into the center of it. In half an hour, when I turned it out it looked nothing more than a cake of maple-sugar. Then I tied it up carefully, and bribed one of the day-scholars to mail it to Copperhead Kate for me, with a little unsigned note of instruction inside.
It was two weeks later that Copperhead Kate reappeared in the bald, white-walled, curtainless reception room of the Ursuline academy. She was still in black, but this time her veil was of heavy crape.
"Can you get rid of this woman?" she said to me between her teeth, for Sister Angelica had accompanied me to that white-walled room with its six pictures of six different Saints.
Sister Angelica, I think, read my face only too well as I asked for a talk with my caller on family affairs. But she went from the room without a word.
"Something's wrong!" I said, swinging about on Copperhead Kate the moment we were alone. She had taken a watch from her purse and was holding it in her hand. I saw at a glance that it was Bud's time-piece. And my heart began to pound.
"I guess you'd better stiffen up for a shock," my caller told me, watching my face with her sleepy green eyes.
"What's happened?" I demanded, staring at the watch.
"Bud wanted you to have this," Copperhead Kate explained as she passed the watch over to me.
"Where's Bud?" I asked, almost in a scream. Copperhead Kate warned me, by a movement, not to raise my voice.
"They shot Bud three days ago when he was trying to make his get-away," I heard the woman in black saying to me. I sat staring at her veil. All the world went misty in front of me.
"They shot him?" I echoed. The face behind the veil moved slowly up and down. I sat there a long time, without moving.
"Tell me about it," I whispered, at last. It struck me as odd that the watch in my hand should be still ticking.
"Bud had cut three bars away with a steel saw that had come in to him in a cake of maple-sugar. He'd dropped from a wall when one of the guards caught sight of him and fired."
"How can I get to him?" I asked. I was on my feet by this time, but I noticed that my knees were shaking.
Copperhead Kate still sat studying my face. I think she was wringing a morbid sort of joy out of my misery.
"You can't get to him, "she explained. "Not unless you want to dig him out of ten inches of quicklime!"
She'd got up from her chair.
"He's dead!" I repeated vacantly, holding on to the back of my chair.
Copperhead Kate answered that question by moving her veiled face slowly up and down. I stood looking at the painting of St. Anthony. I looked at it a long time. I knew when my caller turned and moved across the room. I was conscious of her quiet and undulatory advance toward the door. I knew she was going, although she moved as softly as a snake. But there seemed nothing for me to say. As I stood there I merely repeated those two words, "He's dead!"
I was in a daze all that week. The whole world seemed to have stopped. I'd hitched my wagon to Bud, and they'd put his light out. I'd tried to help him, and instead of that I'd hurt him in the only way that was left for him to be hurt. He was dead—and I was the cause of it!
I was glad enough of my little white room of peace, during the next few weeks. I was easier to manage, after that. I still hated the confinement. I still revolted in spirit at the smallness of the world they had walled me up in. But I began to reach out for something stable, at a time when all my world seemed going like the wooden horses of a carousel. I even began to study, for I found that it made me forget. And, even more than before, there were changes taking place, although I didn't always seem conscious of them.
I often wondered if Bud knew what he was doing when he sent me to that place. I used to ask myself if he realized that he was educating me away from him, forever. For that was actually what happened. The old ways began to seem cheap, and the old grandeurs as pathetic as the cotton grape-vines they festoon road-house restaurants with. I no longer thought of the big things we might have done in that No-Man's Land of the urban outlaw, if Bud had only lived. I began to despise that sort of life. I even grew to shudder at it. I was really learning more than French verbs and how to phrase notes of condolence with elegance. I was learning to look at life from the upper side, instead of from the under. And then I got in the habit of talking things over with Sister Angelica. She was the only woman I ever knew who'd never blow the toot, as Bud's friends would phrase it. She helped me a lot. But she could never make my world over for me. She tried hard. But that sort of thing isn't done in real life.
I stood the Ursuline academy for nineteen long months. And then I made my escape.
Why it was I don't know; but I had to get away. There was peace all around me, but there wasn't peace in my heart. Perhaps it was the hardness and the baldness of the place that proved too much for me—for deep down in my soul there was that absurd but that eternal hunger for splendor. I was blessed or cursed with a love for color, for richness. Something within me always responded to the polished surfaces of old wood, to the harmonizing tones of tapestry, to the high lights you see in silver and cut-glass. If I'd been a pawn-broker's daughter it would have been easier to explain. And I knew I could never have these things. But I had that never-ending ache to be where they were. And they were not at The Pines. So I left The Pines behind me.
I made a clean get-away, crossed the ferry at Windsor with my heart in my mouth, and caught a D. & C. boat for Cleveland. From there I went on to Buffalo. And the next night saw me heading once more for New York.
But it was a different New York that I came to. I returned a stranger to my own home town. I nursed the delusion that henceforth it would be easy, instead of merely doing others, to do good to others. I think I wanted to be a sort of female St. Francis of Forty-Second Street.
The Big City soon put me straight on that. It began by humbling me; and it ended up by humiliating me. I used to think I knew the Old Burg like a book, the same as the broads and ribs who study menu cards in the trotteries and sing This Is The Life imagine they understand that imcomprehensible old island of unrest. I thought I knew it better than the office girls who twice a day take their subway dip and eat wheat-cakes in the dairy luncheries so they may hit the movies at night. I thought, because I'd been a cashier in a Fourteenth Street nickelodeon, and a wrapper and sales-girl in a Twenty-Third Street department store, and a feeder for a stage ventriloquist, and a chicken-stall for a successful gentleman adventurer, that I was nothing but a rabbit thrown back into the brier-patch. And I found out that I was mistaken.
Yet I hadn't been born and brought up in Minetta Lane for nothing. The city hadn't been a stepmother to me for eighteen long years without at least leaving me wise to a few of her ways. I knew how to pinch bananas from Dago Charley's fruit-stand on Fourth Street before I was knee high to a grasshopper. And at eight I was crabbing drop-cakes from the Greenwich House cooking-class. At sixteen I was hitting the Harmony Club outings and not shying at even the thought of two-stepping with a gangster who'd croaked a cop. At seventeen I could down my second glass of suds and not miss a step on the Steeplechase floor at Coney. Things like that, in fact, made up the splendor of life for me in those foolish old days. Yet the city had taught me to be cautious. You can't float for long about the neighborhood of Minetta Lane and not learn to look out for yourself—or go under. And I never intended to go under. I don't know why. But I intended to keep on top. Bud once told me something about Indian children being thrown in the water, when they're mere babies, so as to learn to swim. They've got to swim. Well, I was thrown into the streets, in just about the same way. And to swim, I suppose, became an instinct with me. Bud realized that from the first, I feel sure, and I always respected him for at least respecting my privacy of life.
But back in that city I didn't find any jobs cutting the curb-corners to run me down. After my second day of making the want-ad rounds I began to see I wasn't equipped for anything. All I was especially trained for was a come-on in petticoats—and those are the positions that are never advertised for. Then I tried the Bureau of Social Employment, paid my fee like a man, and woke up to the fact that I couldn't budge an inch without references. And the only reference I could think of was Wendy Washburn. In a case like that, though, I was ashamed to make use of him. And a week later I was glad that I hadn't, for I met him almost face to face at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street. I was sure that he saw me, and I was equally sure that he avoided me. He turned hurriedly into Brentano's without so much as a smile of recognition. It hurt me more than I could explain, more than I could understand.
I turned off the avenue as sore in heart as a lost hound. I didn't want people to see my face. For this reason, I suppose, I edged in close to a crowd staring at some imported posters in Brentano's side window. Right in front of me was a white-haired old man in a gray uniform braided with black. He was a fresh-cheeked, clean-limbed, spry-looking old man, and from the bellows-wallet of well-worn pigs-skin which he carried in his hand I took him to be a bank-messenger for one of the trust companies just around the corner. Yet he seemed to be taking genuine delight in some of those newly displayed Parisian posters, for unconsciously he pushed his wallet down in his pocket and leaned closer to the plate glass for a closer inspection of a colored cover from La Rire. But I gave little further attention to that trim-figured old gentleman, for the more massive figure on my right, I suddenly discovered, was not altogether unknown to me.
It took me several minutes to place him. Then I remembered. It was Pinky McClone, the con-man, the big, blue-eyed, Irish boy who'd been the champion diver of Coethes Slip and grew up to be a lighter-thief and later worked the bathing-beaches as a life-guard and incidentally the bathers themselves as a dip and watch-lifter, with an eye out for any bigger pickings which the day might bring forth. He and Bud, I remembered, had conferred long and earnestly that day at Long Beach when I first met my Hero-Man. But I, of course, had taken no part in that conference.
I was just marshaling these different facts in my mind when I noticed Pinky McClone's big bronzed hand creep out to the pocket that held the wallet. It was as quick and neat a bit of poke-snatching as I'd ever seen. Not another person in that closely packed crowd caught a glimpse of the move. A moment later Pinky was edging airily off toward Fifth Avenue and I was wondering just what I ought to do. Before I had a chance to answer that, however, a wail went up from the stunned old bank-runner and he was sobbingly announcing to a rather skeptical circle of onlookers that he had been robbed.
I didn't wait to feel sorry for him. For Pinky, by this time, had turned south on the avenue and was drifting down through the crowd toward Madison Square, shaking hands with himself, I suppose, to find that he'd worked such a neat get-away. But he was as easy to spot as a light-house. I followed, close at his heels.
We were well In the square when he suddenly stopped, swerved, and dropped into an empty bench on which lay a discarded newspaper. I knew that movement as well as though it were written in Roman script. That con-man had caught sight of either a bluebird or a singed cat—which latter is simply an officer in plain-clothes. And he didn't want his trail to cross his enemy's.
So I dropped down on the same bench with Pinky, with a fastidious little sigh of weariness. I could see him inspecting me out of the corner of his eye as he bent over his paper. My being there didn't seem to add to his troubles. What worried him was that plain-clothes man who walked slowly by. Pinky's nose was within six inches of the sporting-page as that singed cat drifted so artlessly past our bench. But I had seen the officer's eye take in Pinky's intent figure. I knew he wasn't so artless as he looked.
Instinct, I suppose, advised Pinky of the same fact, for he wasn't letting one move of the enemy escape him, over the edge of that newspaper. Then he turned and studied my face.
He shifted a little closer along the bench. I knew, even before he started to speak, that he had decided to take a chance. And for some reason which I couldn't quite define, I felt disappointed and disturbed at that decision of his.
"For the love o' Gawd, lady," he said in a hurried and husky sort of whisper, "will you help me out?"
I gave him the icicle-eye, pretending not to know what he was driving at.
"A big strong man like you ought to be ashamed of begging on the streets," I gently but firmly told him. But he brushed this aside with an impatient snort.
"Lady, you can save me from ten years in a cell. You can do it by no more than a move o' the hand."
"What must I do?" I inquired.
He sat there with his legs crossed, and the newspaper held up in front of him. But behind that screen, I knew, he was a terribly frightened man. His bronzed face was exactly the color of old cheese.
"That man coming toward us is a policeman. Only he's wearing plain-clothes. They've been hounding me since last winter. He'll be gathering me in, and when he gets me there I'll be frisked!"
"What difference will that make?" I asked. "And what do you mean by being frisked, anyway?" But I had to smile in spite of myself. It seemed so much like old times.
"Get this under your clothes!" he said out of the corner of his mouth. He said it hurriedly, and almost roughly, for his time of argument had already slipped by. The plain-clothes man was bearing down on him.
I could feel the man on the bench shoving the pigskin wallet in under me. I neither moved nor spoke. I merely sat tight. The singed cat had stopped directly in front of us.
"What're you doing in over your dead-line?" that officer was inquiring of my new-found friend.
"I'm workin'!" announced the man on the bench.
"Working?" echoed the cop. "So I see—and pulling the old stuff right on the avenue! So I guess, Pinky, we'll have to toddle along."
The man beside me, I noticed, had taken on a heavy and sullen look.
"I haven't set foot on that avenue for seven weeks," he protested.
"You weren't up Fifth Avenue there twenty minutes ago?" demanded the officer.
"I've been right here on this bench for the last hour and a half," announced the other man.
"Working, I suppose?" mocked the guardian of the law. But it was plain enough to Pinky that his tormentor stood none too sure of his ground.
"Why, this lady here knows I've been on this bench for over forty minutes," declared that king of liars, growing bolder with the thought of a getaway.
The singed cat turned to me.
"Do you know this man?" he inquired.
I shook my head.
"But do you know that he's been here for the last forty minutes?"
"What difference does it make?" I stalled, pretending the whole situation was a mystery to me.
"Because this man has a police record as a pick-pocket, and there's just been a job a couple of blocks up the avenue that looks like his work."
"What was stolen?"
"A bank-runner's wallet full of checks and notes," was the reply.
"And I'd be roosting here on a park bench, wouldn't I," broke in Pinky, "if I was heeled with a haul like that!"
"How do I know you're not heeled with it?" demanded the officer.
"Satisfy yourself, my friend, satisfy yourself," luxuriously announced the man on the bench. The detective dropped down on the seat beside him. I could see him pass his hands over the other man's body, like a mesmerist. It was a startlingly adroit series of passes and touches. It couldn't have taken half a minute. But it seemed to satisfy the officer of the law.
He was plainly disappointed, and Pinky, I could see, was enjoying the discomfiture of his oppressor. And I considered that it was about time for me to step into the game.
"Are you an officer?" I demanded.
The man standing close beside Pinky McClone explained that he was an officer, or, rather an operative for Locke's office, and that a big part of the Locke Agency work had to do with the Bankers' Protective Association. Pinky was leisurely folding up his newspaper, prior to moving on.
"All right," I sang out to that operative, "grab your man. He's stalling."
It was like a horse sneezing in a feed-bag.
"He's what?" cried that startled singed cat.
"I say he's stalling. Here's the wallet he stole. He tried to push it under my skirt when he saw you coming!"
The hand of that operative of Locke's went out like a lightning flash. It wasn't until he had a firm grip on the slack of the other man's sleeve that he even turned to look at the wallet itself.
The other man, strangely enough, did not struggle. I had expected a fight, an out-and-out free-for-all with fists, and had edged to one side, to get a little distance between me and the dust of that engagement. But Pinky, for all his strength, offered no resistance. He looked at me for a solid thirty seconds, however, with hate in his eye. He could have cut my heart out, without a whimper.
"Excuse me, miss, but would you mind coming along to the Chief's office with us?" that singed cat was inquiring as Pinky and I finished our stare-fest.
I went. And that was how I first came to meet the Chief, Big Ben Locke. And an hour later, after Big Ben had talked over the case of Pinky McClone, and asked me a number of questions and ventured the opinion that I was an uncommonly clever girl, he offhandedly inquired how I'd like to be an operative, at fifteen a week to begin with, and tog out in new clothes and ride up and down in the Fifth Avenue busses as a "spotter" for fare-cribbers.
I didn't hesitate long over that offer, though I found out, later, that he was handing me the cake with the icing side up. But my triumph was clouded by the thought of Pinky McClone. I still had the habit of looking at things from the occasional offender's side of the line.
"Will that man really get ten years?" I asked, heavy of heart, for I couldn't help remembering what I had seen of the inside of Jackson. And ten years was a terribly big part of any man's life.
The Chief laughed a little.
"It'll be more like ten days," was his retort. "But the important thing, I guess, is getting that eighty thousand dollars in securities back and getting 'em intact!"