«For Heaven's sake, Captain,» sniffed Murray, «I doubt that I would have waited for you if I had suspected you were so desperate as to resort to swill barrels. I»—
«Cheese it,» said the Captain, harshly. «I'm not hogging it yet. It's all on the outside. I went around on Essex and proposed marriage to that Catrina that's got the fruit shop there. Now, that business could be built up. She's a peach as far as a Dago could be. I thought I had that senoreena mashed sure last week. But look what she done to me! I guess I got too fresh. Well there's another scheme queered.»
«You don't mean to say,» said Murray, with infinite contempt, «that you would have married that woman to help yourself out of your disgraceful troubles!»
«Me?» said the Captain. «I'd marry the Empress of China for one bowl of chop suey. I'd commit murder for a plate of beef stew. I'd steal a wafer from a waif. I'd be a Mormon for a bowl of chowder.»
«I think,» said Murray, resting his head on his hands, «that I would play Judas for the price of one drink of whiskey. For thirty pieces of silver I would»—
«Oh, come now!» exclaimed the Captain in dismay. «You wouldn't do that, Murray! I always thought that Kike's squeal on his boss was about the lowest–down play that ever happened. A man that gives his friend away is worse than a pirate.»
Through the park stepped a large man scanning the benches where the electric light fell.
«Is that you, Mac?» he said, halting before the derelicts. His diamond stickpin dazzled. His diamond–studded fob chain assisted. He was big and smooth and well fed. «Yes, I see it's you,» he continued. «They told me at Mike's that I might find you over here. Let me see you a few minutes, Mac.»
The Captain lifted himself with a grunt of alacrity. If Charlie Finnegan had come down in the bottomless pit to seek him there must be something doing. Charlie guided him by an arm into a patch of shadow.
«You know, Mac,» he said, «they're trying Inspector Pickering on graft charges.»
«He was my inspector,» said the Captain.
«O'Shea wants the job,» went on Finnegan. «He must have it. It's for the good of the organization. Pickering must go under. Your testimony will do it. He was your 'man higher up' when you were on the force. His share of the boodle passed through your hands. You must go on the stand and testify against him.»
«He was» — began the Captain.
«Wait a minute,» said Finnegan. A bundle of yellowish stuff came out of his inside pocket. «Five hundred dollars in it for you. Two–fifty on the spot, and the rest»—
«He was my friend, I say,» finished the Captain. «I'll see you and the gang, and the city, and the party in the flames of Hades before I'll take the stand against Dan Pickering. I'm down and out; but I'm no traitor to a man that's been my friend.» The Captain's voice rose and boomed like a split trombone. «Get out of this park, Charlie Finnegan, where us thieves and tramps and boozers are your betters; and take your dirty money with you.»
Finnegan drifted out by another walk. The Captain returned to his seat.
«I couldn't avoid hearing,» said Murray, drearily. «I think you are the biggest fool I ever saw.»
«What would you have done?» asked the Captain.
«Nailed Pickering to the cross,» said Murray.
«Sonny,» said the Captain, huskily and without heat. «You and me are different. New York is divided into two parts—above Forty–second street, and below Fourteenth. You come from the other part. We both act according to our lights.»
An illuminated clock above the trees retailed the information that it lacked the half hour of twelve. Both men rose from the bench and moved away together as if seized by the same idea. They left the park, struck through a narrow cross street, and came into Broadway, at this hour as dark, echoing and de–peopled as a byway in Pompeii.
Northward they turned; and a policeman who glanced at their unkempt and slinking figures withheld the attention and suspicion that he would have granted them at any other hour and place. For on every street in that part of the city other unkempt and slinking figures were shuffling and hurrying toward a converging point—a point that is marked by no monument save that groove on the pavement worn by tens of thousands of waiting feet.
At Ninth street a tall man wearing an opera hat alighted from a Broadway car and turned his face westward. But he saw Murray, pounced upon him and dragged him under a street light. The Captain lumbered slowly to the corner, like a wounded bear, and waited, growling.
«Jerry!» cried the hatted one. «How fortunate! I was to begin a search for you to–morrow. The old gentleman has capitulated. You're to be restored to favor. Congratulate you. Come to the office in the morning and get all the money you want. I've liberal instructions in that respect.»
«And the little matrimonial arrangement?» said Murray, with his head turned sidewise.
«Why. — er—well, of course, your uncle understands—expects that the engagement between you and Miss Vanderhurst shall be»—
«Good night,» said Murray, moving away.
«You madman!» cried the other, catching his arm. «Would you give up two millions on account of»—
«Did you ever see her nose, old man?» asked Murray, solemnly.
«But, listen to reason, Jerry. Miss Vanderhurst is an heiress, and»—
«Did you ever see it?»
«Yes, I admit that her nose isn't»—
«Good night!» said Murray. «My friend is waiting for me. I am quoting him when I authorize you to report that there is 'nothing doing.' Good night.»
A wriggling line of waiting men extended from a door in Tenth street far up Broadway, on the outer edge of the pavement. The Captain and Murray fell in at the tail of the quivering millipede.
«Twenty feet longer than it was last night,» said Murray, looking up at his measuring angle of Grace Church.
«Half an hour,» growled the Captain, «before we get our punk.»
The city clocks began to strike 12; the Bread Line moved forward slowly, its leathern feet sliding on the stones with the sound of a hissing serpent, as they who had lived according to their lights closed up in the rear.
A MIDSUMMER KNIGHT'S DREAM
«The knights are dead;
Their swords are rust.
Except a few who have to hust-
Le all the time
To raise the dust.»
Dear Reader: It was summertime. The sun glared down upon the city with pitiless ferocity. It is difficult for the sun to be ferocious and exhibit compunction simultaneously. The heat was—oh, bother thermometers! — who cares for standard measures, anyhow? It was so hot that—
The roof gardens put on so many extra waiters that you could hope to get your gin fizz now—as soon as all the other people got theirs. The hospitals were putting in extra cots for bystanders. For when little, woolly dogs loll their tongues out and say «woof, woof!» at the fleas that bite 'em, and nervous old black bombazine ladies screech «Mad dog!» and policemen begin to shoot, somebody is going to get hurt. The man from Pompton, N.J., who always wears an overcoat in July, had turned up in a Broadway hotel drinking hot Scotches and enjoying his annual ray from the calcium. Philanthropists were petitioning the Legislature to pass a bill requiring builders to make tenement fire–escapes more commodious, so that families might die all together of the heat instead of one or two at a time. So many men were telling you about the number of baths they took each day that you wondered how they got along after the real lessee of the apartment came back to town and thanked 'em for taking such good care of it. The young man who called loudly for cold beef and beer in the restaurant, protesting that roast pullet and Burgundy was really too heavy for such weather, blushed when he met your eye, for you had heard him all winter calling, in modest tones, for the same ascetic viands. Soup, pocketbooks, shirt waists, actors and baseball excuses grew thinner. Yes, it was summertime.