LITMIR.BIZ

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      CHAPTER IV

      AN UNINVITED GUEST

      Black day followed black day, and grudged penny followed grudged penny, till at length there came a day when it seemed the blackness could become no blacker and when his remaining pennies were less than his fingers. On this day he sat long at his window, his wasted, despair-tightened face looking out upon the patched undergarments swinging from lines and upon the boxes and barrels and bottles and papers and rags that littered the deep bottom of the yard, grimly thinking over the prophecy of Kate Morgan. One of the two months she had given his honesty was gone. By the time the second had passed – ? He shiveringly wondered.

      This day he ate no evening meal. For a week now one meal had been his daily ration, and that meal pitiably poor and pitiably small. He sat about his room till his nickel clock – which Kate Morgan had brought in one day and deposited upon the wash-stand with her undebatable air of finality – reported quarter past nine, when he rose and walked down into the street. It had been one of those warm days that sometimes come in mid-November – benign messages of remembrance, as it were, from departed summer – and now the people of the tenements filled the streets, for on the packed East Side the street, on warm days, is parlor to the parent and the lover, and nursery to the child.

      As David stepped forth he did not notice that he was watched by a pair of keen, boyish eyes from under the rim of a battered slouch hat, and had he noticed he would not have been aware that these same eyes had watched him before. It was a Wednesday evening and David, entangled among the people, like a vessel in a sargasso sea, pursued a slow course toward the Mission, never observing that a boy in a battered hat followed him a way then turned back.

      He took his place in the shadowed doorway and waited for Helen Chambers to appear. In a few minutes she came out, Dr. Franklin with her as usual. There was also a second man, gray-haired and slightly stooped, whom David recognised as an older brother of Mr. Chambers, and whom he remembered as a clear-visioned, gentle old philosopher greatly loved by his niece. As they passed, David leaned from the shadow to follow her with his eyes, and the light from the street lamp fell across his face. Dr. Franklin, chancing this instant to look in David's direction, excused himself to Helen and her uncle, who moved forward a few paces, and stepped to the doorway. David pressed frantically back into the shadow.

      "Good evening," said Dr. Franklin, holding out a firm, cordial hand, into which David laid his limp fingers. "I've seen you about several times since the evening you called. I've been looking for a chance to invite you to the Mission."

      David hardly heard him. He was thinking, wildly, "Suppose she should step to his side? Suppose he should draw me into the light?" It was a moment of blissful, agonising consternation.

      "Perhaps I'll come," he managed to whisper. He feared lest his whisper had reached her, and lest she had recognised his voice. But she did not look around.

      "I shall expect you. Good night."

      Dr. Franklin rejoined Helen and her uncle, and David's hearing, which strained after him, heard him explain as they moved away: "A man who came to the Mission in Mr. Morton's time. He often stands about the Mission, looking at it, but he never comes in."

      As soon as they were out of sight David, a-tremble at the narrowness of his escape, slipped from the door and hurried away. As he went, the old question besieged him. If, a minute ago, he had been drawn into the light, would she have spoken to him? And if she had, would it not have been coldly, with disdain?

      By the time he reached his tenement he had regained part of his lost composure. As he slipped the key into his door, he heard a sudden scrambling sound within. All his senses were instantly called to alertness. He threw open the door, and sprang into the darkened room.

      In the same instant a vague figure leaped through the open window out upon the landing of the fire-escape. David crossed the little room at a bound, caught the coat-tails of the escaping figure, dragged it backwards. The figure turned like a flash, threw something over David's head – a sack, David thought – sprang upon David, and tied the something round his neck with a fierce embrace. David staggered backward under the weight of his adversary, and the two went to the floor in the narrow space between the bed and the wall.

      Instantly the figure, with a jerk and a catlike squirm, tried to break away, but David's arms, gripped about its body, held it fast. Then it resumed its choking embrace of David's neck. The sack about his head was heavy; the air hardly came through it. He began to gasp. He tried frantically to throw the figure off, but it held its place. Then one hand fell upon a mop of hair. He clutched it and pushed fiercely upward. The embrace broke, and two fists began to beat his face through the sack. An instant later David managed to scramble to his feet and throw off the sack – and he then saw that the writhing, kicking figure he had captured reached midway between his waist and shoulders.

      His right hand still fastened in his captive's hair, David lighted the gas. There, at the end of his arm, was a boy with the figure of fourteen and the face of twenty. His clothes, baggy and torn, were for the latter age; the trousers were rolled up six years at the bottom. The face was wrinkled in a scowl, and the eyes gleamed defiance. He was panting heavily. On the floor lay what David had thought was a sack; it was his own overcoat.

      "Why you're nothing but a boy!" David cried.

      "A boy! Nuttin'! If I'd been in form, I'd 'a' showed you!"

      David locked the door, cut off escape by standing before the window, and disentangled his fingers from the boy's locks. He then saw that the boy's dirty yellow hair flowed upward from his forehead in a cow-lick.

      The boy put his hands in his pockets and continued his defiant stare.

      "Now, sir, what were you doing in here?" David demanded.

      "What you t'ink?" the boy returned coolly. "You t'ink I come to collect de rent?"

      "You tried to steal my coat."

      "Gee, you're wise! How'd you guess it?"

      David regarded the little fellow steadily for a minute or more. He now noticed that the figure before him was very thin, and he remembered that once the embrace had been broken the boy had been a mere child even to his own weak strength.

      "What did you want that coat for?" he asked.

      "It's like dis, cul," the boy answered in a tone of confidence. "I owns a swell clo'es-joint on Fift' Avenoo, an' I'm out gittin' in me fall stock."

      "What's your name?" David demanded.

      "Reggie Vanderbilt."

      David did not try another question. He scrutinised the boy in silence, wondering what he should do with this young thief who, instead of showing the proper caught-in-the-act penitence, persisted in wearing the air of one who is master of the situation. David now took note that the boy's coat-collar was turned up and that the coat was held closed by a button near the throat and a safety pin at the bottom. The gaping front of the coat showed him a white line. He stepped forward, and with a quick hand loosened the button at the throat. It was as he had guessed – nothing but a mere rag of an undershirt that left the chest half bare – and the bare chest was rippled with ribs.

      "Keep out o' dere!" the boy snapped, jerking away.

      David was silent; then he said accusingly: "You're hungry!"

      "Well, if I am – it's me own bellyache!"

      "You tried to take that coat because you're hungry?"

      "I did, did I?"

      "Didn't you?"

      "Oh, come stop jabbin' me in de ear wid your questions," the boy returned sharply. "What you t'ink I took it for? To buy me goil a automobile?"

      He was silent for several moments, his bright eyes on David; then he threw off his defiant look. "Hungry?" he sniffed. "You don't know what de woid means! Me – well, me belly don't have to look it up in no dictionary. I ain't chawed nuttin' but wind for a mont'."

      "You were going to sell it?"

      "Nix. Pawn it."

      David looked from the boy to the coat, and from the coat to the boy. One hand, in his pocket, mechanically fingered

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