The Project Gutenberg EBook of Calvary Alley, by Alice Hegan Rice

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: Calvary Alley

Author: Alice Hegan Rice

Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9794]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on October 17, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALVARY ALLEY ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan
and PG Distributed Proofreaders




                             CALVARY ALLEY

                          BY ALICE HEGAN RICE

                                 1917


Author of "MRS. WIGGS OF THE CABBAGE PATCH," "LOVEY MARY," "SANDY," ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY WALTER BIGGS

THIS STORY IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO THE SMALL BAND OF KENTUCKY
WRITERS WITH WHOM IT HAS BEEN MY HAPPY FORTUNE TO MAKE THE LITERARY
PILGRIMAGE




CONTENTS

CHAPTER


     I THE FIGHT
    II THE SNAWDORS AT HOME
   III THE CLARKES AT HOME
    IV JUVENILE COURT
     V ON PROBATION
    VI BUTTERNUT LANE
   VII AN EVICTION
  VIII AMBITION STIRS
    IX BUTTONS
     X THE PRINCESS COMES TO GRIEF
    XI THE STATE TAKES A HAND
   XII CLARKE'S
  XIII EIGHT TO SIX
   XIV IDLENESS
    XV MARKING TIME
   XVI MISS BOBINET'S
  XVII BEHIND THE TWINKLING LIGHTS
 XVIII THE FIRST NIGHT
   XIX PREPARATIONS FOR FLIGHT
    XX WILD OATS
   XXI DAN
  XXII IN THE SIGNAL TOWER
 XXIII CALVARY CATHEDRAL
  XXIV BACK AT CLARKE'S
   XXV MAC
  XXVI BETWEEN TWO FIRES
 XXVII FATE TAKES A HAND
XXVIII THE PRICE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
  XXIX IN TRAINING
   XXX HER FIRST CASE
  XXXI MR. DEMRY
 XXXII THE NEW FOREMAN
XXXIII NANCE COMES INTO HER OWN




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


"The boy is infatuated with that girl"

"Her tense muscles relaxed; she forgot to cry"

"Don't call a policeman!" she implored wildly




CALVARY ALLEY




CHAPTER I

THE FIGHT


You never would guess in visiting Cathedral Court, with its people's hall
and its public baths, its clean, paved street and general air of smug
propriety, that it harbors a notorious past. But those who knew it by its
maiden name, before it was married to respectability, recall Calvary
Alley as a region of swarming tenements, stale beer dives, and frequent
police raids. The sole remaining trace of those unregenerate days is the
print of a child's foot in the concrete walk just where it leaves the
court and turns into the cathedral yard.

All the tired feet that once plodded home from factory and foundry, all
the unsteady feet that staggered in from saloon and dance-hall, all the
fleeing feet that sought a hiding place, have long since passed away and
left no record of their passing. Only that one small footprint, with its
perfect outline, still pauses on its way out of the alley into the great
world beyond.

At the time Nance Molloy stepped into that soft concrete and thus set in
motion the series of events that was to influence her future career, she
had never been told that her inalienable rights were life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. Nevertheless she had claimed them intuitively.
When at the age of one she had crawled out of the soap-box that served as
a cradle, and had eaten half a box of stove polish, she was acting in
strict accord with the Constitution.

By the time she reached the sophisticated age of eleven her ideals had
changed, but her principles remained firm. She did not stoop to beg for
her rights, but struck out for them boldly with her small bare fists. She
was a glorious survival of that primitive Kentucky type that stood side
by side with man in the early battles and fought valiantly for herself.

On the hot August day upon which she began to make history, she stood in
the gutter amid a crowd of yelling boys, her feet far apart, her hands
full of mud, waiting tensely to chastise the next sleek head that dared
show itself above the cathedral fence. She wore a boy's shirt and a
ragged brown skirt that flapped about her sturdy bare legs. Her matted
hair was bound in two disheveled braids around her head and secured with
a piece of shoe-string. Her dirty round face was lighted up by a pair of
dancing blue eyes, in which just now blazed the unholy light of conflict.

The feud between the Calvary Micks and the choir boys was an ancient
one, carried on from one generation to another and gaining prestige with
age. It was apt to break out on Saturday afternoons, after rehearsal,
when the choirmaster had taken his departure. Frequently the disturbance
amounted to no more than taunts and jeers on one side and threats and
recriminations on the other, but the atmosphere that it created was of
that electrical nature that might at any moment develop a storm.

Nance Molloy, at the beginning of the present controversy, had been
actively engaged in civil warfare in which the feminine element of the
alley was pursuing a defensive policy against the marauding masculine.
But at the first indication of an outside enemy, the herd instinct
manifested itself, and she allied herself with prompt and passionate
loyalty to the cause of the Calvary Micks.

The present argument was raging over the possession of a spade that had
been left in the alley by the workmen who were laying a concrete pavement
into the cathedral yard.

"Aw, leave 'em have it!" urged a philosophical alleyite from the top of a
barrel. "Them ole avenoo kids ain't nothin'!--We could lick daylight
outen 'em if we wanted to."

"Ye-e-e-s you could!" came in a chorus of jeers from the fence top, and a
brown-eyed youth in a white-frilled shirt, with a blue Windsor tie
knotted under his sailor collar, added imperiously, "You get too fresh
down there, and I'll call the janitor!"

This gross breach of military etiquette evoked a retort from Nance that
was too inelegant to chronicle.

"Tomboy! tomboy!" jeered the brown-eyed youth from above. "Why don't you
borrow some girls' clothes?"

"All right, Sissy," said Nance, "lend me yours."

The Micks shrieked their approval, while Nance rolled a mud ball and,
with the deadly aim of a sharpshooter, let it fly straight at the
white-frilled bosom of her tormentor.

"Soak it to her, Mac," yelled the boy next to him, "the kid's got no
business butting in! Make her get out of the way!"

"Go on and make me!" implored Nance.

"I will if you don't stand back," threatened the boy called Mac.

Nance promptly stepped up to the alley gate and wiggled her fingers in a
way peculiarly provocative to a juvenile enemy.

"Poor white trash!" he jeered. "You stay where you belong! Don't you step
on our concrete!"

"Will if I want to. It's my foot. I'll put it where I like."

"Bet you don't. You're afraid to."

"I ain't either."

"Well, _do_ it then. I dare you! Anybody that would take a--"

In a second Nance had thrust her leg as far as possible between the
boards that warned the public to keep out, and had planted a small alien
foot firmly in the center of the soft cement.

This audacious act was the signal for instant battle. With yells of
indignation the choir boys hurled themselves from the fence, and
descended upon their foes. Mud gave place to rocks, sticks clashed, the
air resounded with war cries. Ash barrels were overturned, straying cats
made flying leaps for safety, heads appeared at doorways and windows, and
frantic mothers made futile efforts to quell the riot.

Thus began the greatest fight ever enjoyed in Calvary Alley. It went down
in neighborhood annals as the decisive clash between the classes, in
which the despised swells "was learnt to know their places onct an' fer
all!" For ten minutes it raged with unabated fury, then when the tide of
battle began to set unmistakably in favor of the alley, parental
authority waned and threats changed to cheers. Old and young united in
the conviction that the Monroe Doctrine must be maintained at any cost!

In and out of the subsiding pandemonium darted Nance Molloy, covered with
mud from the shoestring on her hair to the rag about her toe, giving and
taking blows with the best, and emitting yells of frenzied victory over
every vanquished foe. Suddenly her transports were checked by a
disturbing sight. At the end of the alley, locked in mortal combat, she
beheld her arch-enemy, he of the brown eyes and the frilled shirt, whom
the boys called Mac, sitting astride the hitherto invincible Dan Lewis,
the former philosopher of the ash barrel and one of the acknowledged
leaders of the Calvary Micks.

It was a moment of intense chagrin for Nance, untempered by the fact that
Dan's adversary was much the bigger boy. Up to this time, the whole
affair had been a glorious game, but at the sight of the valiant Dan
lying helpless on his back, his mouth bloody from the blows of the boy
above him, the comedy changed suddenly to tragedy. With a swift charge
from the rear, she flung herself upon the victor, clapping her mud-daubed
hands about his eyes and dragging him backward with a force that sent
them both rolling in the gutter.

Blind with fury, the boy scrambled to his feet, and, seizing a rock,
hurled it with all his strength after the retreating Dan. The missile
flew wide of its mark and, whizzing high over the fence, crashed through
the great rose window that was the special pride of Calvary Cathedral.

The din of breaking glass, the simultaneous appearance of a cross-eyed
policeman, and of Mason, the outraged janitor, together with the
horrified realization of what had happened, brought the frenzied
combatants to their senses. Amid a clamor of accusations and denials, the
policeman seized upon two culprits and indicated a third.

"You let me go!" shrieked Mac. "My father'll make it all right! Tell him
who I am, Mason! Make him let me go!"

But Mason was bent upon bringing all the criminals to justice.

"I'm going to have you all up before the juvenile court, rich and poor!"
he declared excitedly. "You been deviling the life out of me long enough!
If the vestry had 'a' listened at me and had you up before now, that
window wouldn't be smashed. I told the bishop something was going to
happen, and he says, 'The next time there's trouble, you find the leaders
and swear out a warrant. Don't wait to ask anybody!'"

By this time every window in the tenement at the blind end of the alley
had been converted into a proscenium box, and suggestions, advice, and
incriminating evidence were being freely volunteered.

"Who started this here racket, anyhow?" asked the policeman, in the bored
tone of one who is rehearsing an oft-repeated scene.

"I did," declared Nance Molloy, with something of the feminine
gratification Helen of Troy must have felt when she "launched a thousand
ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium."

"You Nance!" screamed a woman from a third-story window. "You know you
never done no such a thing! I was settin' here an' seen ever'thing that
happened; it was them there boys."

"So it was you, Dan Lewis, was it?" said the policeman, recognizing one
of his panting victims, the one whose ragged shirt had been torn
completely off, leaving his heaving chest and brown shoulders bare. "An'
it ain't surprised, I am. Who is this other little dude?"

"None of your business!" cried Mac furiously, trying to wrench himself
free. "I tell you my father will pay for the darned old window."

"Aisy there," said the policeman. "Does anybody know him?"

"It's Mr. Clarke's son, up at the bottle works," said Mason.

"You let me go," shrieked the now half-frantic boy. "My father 'll make
you pay for this. You see if he don't!"

"None o' your guff," said the policeman. "I ain't wantin' to keep you now
I got your name. Onny more out o' the boonch, Mr. Mason?"

Mason swept a gleaning eye over the group, and as he did so he spied the
footprint, in the concrete.

"Who did that?" he demanded in a fresh burst of wrath.

Those choir boys who had not fled the scene gave prompt and incriminating
testimony.

"No! she never!" shouted the woman from the third floor, now suspended
half-way out of the window. "Nance Molloy was up here a-washin' dishes
with me. Don't you listen at them pasty-faced cowards a-puttin' it off on
a innercent little girl!"

But the innocent little girl had no idea of seeking refuge in her sex.
Hers had been a glorious and determining part in the day's battle, and
the distinction of having her name taken down with those of the great
leaders was one not to be foregone.

"I did do it," she declared excitedly. "That there boy dared me to. Ketch
me takin' a dare offen a avenoo kid!"

"What's your name, Sis?" asked the policeman.

"Nance Molloy."

"Where do you live?"

"Up there at Snawdor's. That there was Mis' Snawdor a-yellin' at me."

"Is she yer mother?"

"Nope. She's me step."

"And yer father?"

"He's me step too. I'm a two-step," she added with an impudent toss of
the head to show her contempt for the servant of the law, a blue-coated,
brass-buttoned interloper who swooped down on you from around corners,
and reported you at all times and seasons.

By this time Mrs. Snawdor had gotten herself down the two flights of
stairs, and was emerging from the door of the tenement, taking down her
curl papers as she came. She was a plump, perspiring person who might
have boasted good looks had it not been for two eye-teeth that completely
dominated her facial landscape.

"You surely ain't fixin' to report her?" she asked ingratiatingly
of Mason. "A little 'leven-year-ole orphin that never done no harm
to nobody?"

"It's no use arguing," interrupted Mason firmly. "I'm going to file out a
warrant against them three children if it's the last act of my mortal
life. There ain't a boy in the alley that gives me any more trouble than
that there little girl, a-throwin' mud over the fence and climbing round
the coping and sneaking into the cathedral to look under the pews for
nickels, if I so much as turn my back!"

"He wants the nickels hisself!" cried Nance shrilly, pushing her nose
flat and pursing her lips in such a clever imitation of the irate janitor
that the alley shrieked with joy.

"You limb o' Satan!" cried Mrs. Snawdor, making a futile pass at her.
"It's a God's mericle you ain't been took up before this! And it's me as
'll have the brunt to bear, a-stoppin' my work to go to court, a-lying to
yer good character, an' a-payin' the fine. It's a pity able-bodied men
like policemens an' janitors can't be tendin' their own business 'stid
of comin' interferin' with the family of a hard-workin' woman like me. If
there's any justice in this world it ain't never flowed in my
direction!"

And Mrs. Snawdor, half dragging, half pushing Nance, disappeared into the
dark entrance of the tenement, breathing maledictions first against her
charge, then against the tyranny of the law.




CHAPTER II

THE SNAWDORS AT HOME


If ever a place had a down-at-heel, out-of-elbow sort of look, it was
Calvary Alley. At its open end and two feet above it the city went
rushing and roaring past like a great river, quite oblivious of this
unhealthy bit of backwater into which some of its flotsam and jetsam had
been caught and held, generating crime and disease and sending them out
again into the main current.

For despite the fact that the alley rested under the very wing of the
great cathedral from which it took its name, despite the fact that it
echoed daily to the chimes in the belfry and at times could even hear the
murmured prayers of the congregation, it concerned itself not in the
least with matters of the spirit. Heaven was too remote and mysterious,
Hell too present and prosaic, to be of the least interest. And the
cathedral itself, holding out welcoming arms to all the noble avenues
that stretched in leafy luxury to the south, forgot entirely to glance
over its shoulder at the sordid little neighbor that lay under the very
shadow of its cross.

At the blind end of the alley, wedged in between two towering
warehouses, was Number One, a ramshackle tenement which in some forgotten
day had been a fine old colonial residence. The city had long since
hemmed it in completely, and all that remained of its former grandeur
were a flight of broad steps that once boasted a portico and the
imposing, fan-shaped arch above the doorway.

In the third floor of Number One, on the side next the cathedral, dwelt
the Snawdor family, a social unit of somewhat complex character. The
complication came about by the paterfamilias having missed his calling.
Mr. Snawdor was by instinct and inclination a bachelor. He had early in
life found a modest rut in which he planned to run undisturbed into
eternity, but he had been discovered by a widow, who was possessed of an
initiative which, to a man of Snawdor's retiring nature, was destiny.

At the time she met him she had already led two reluctant captives to the
hymeneal altar, and was wont to boast, when twitted about the fact, that
"the Lord only knew what she might 'a' done if it hadn't been fer them
eye-teeth!" Her first husband had been Bud Molloy, a genial young
Irishman who good-naturedly allowed himself to be married out of
gratitude for her care of his motherless little Nance. Bud had not lived
to repent the act; in less than a month he heroically went over an
embankment with his engine, in one of those fortunate accidents in which
"only the engineer is killed."

The bereft widow lost no time in seeking consolation. Naturally the first
person to present himself on terms of sympathetic intimacy was the
undertaker who officiated at poor Bud's funeral. At the end of six months
she married him, and was just beginning to enjoy the prestige which his
profession gave her, when Mr. Yager also passed away, becoming, as it
were, his own customer. Her legacy from him consisted of a complete
embalming outfit and a feeble little Yager who inherited her father's
tendency to spells.

Thus encumbered with two small girls, a less sanguine person would have
retired from the matrimonial market. But Mrs. Yager was not easily
discouraged; she was of a marrying nature, and evidently resolved that
neither man nor Providence should stand in her way. Again casting a
speculative eye over the field, she discerned a new shop in the alley,
the sign of which announced that the owner dealt in "Bungs and Fawcetts."
On the evening of the same day the chronic ailment from which the kitchen
sink had suffered for two years was declared to be acute, and Mr. Snawdor
was called in for consultation.

He was a timid, dejected person with a small pointed chin that trembled
when he spoke. Despite the easy conventions of the alley, he kept his
clothes neatly brushed and his shoes polished, and wore a collar on week
days. These signs of prosperity were his undoing. Before he had time to
realize what was happening to him, he had been skilfully jolted out of
his rut by the widow's experienced hand, and bumped over a hurried
courtship into a sudden marriage. He returned to consciousness to find
himself possessed of a wife and two stepchildren and moved from his small
neat room over his shop to the indescribable disorder of Number One.

The subsequent years had brought many little Snawdors in their wake, and
Mr. Snawdor, being thus held up by the highwayman Life, ignominiously
surrendered. He did not like being married; he did not enjoy being a
father; his one melancholy satisfaction lay in being a martyr.

Mrs. Snawdor, who despite her preference for the married state derived
little joy from domestic duties, was quite content to sally forth as a
wage-earner. By night she scrubbed office buildings and by day she slept
and between times she sought diversion in the affairs of her neighbors.

Thus it was that the household burdens fell largely upon Nance Molloy's
small shoulders, and if she wiped the dishes without washing them, and
"shook up the beds" without airing them, and fed the babies dill pickles,
it was no more than older housekeepers were doing all around her.

Late in the afternoon of the day of the fight, when the sun, despairing
of making things any hotter than they were, dropped behind the warehouse,
Nance, carrying a box of crackers, a chunk of cheese, and a bucket of
beer, dodged in and out among the push-carts and the barrels of the alley
on her way home from Slap Jack's saloon. There was a strong temptation on
her part to linger, for a hurdy-gurdy up at the corner was playing a
favorite tune, and echoes of the fight were still heard from animated
groups in various doorways. But Nance's ears still tingled from a recent
boxing, and she resolutely kept on her way until she reached the worn
steps of Number One and scurried through its open doorway.

The nice distinction between a flat and a tenement is that the front
door of one is always kept closed, and the other open. In this
particular instance the matter admitted of no discussion, for there was
no front door. The one that originally hung under the fan-shaped
Colonial arch had long since been kicked in during some nocturnal raid,
and had never been replaced.

When the gas neglected to get itself lighted before dark at Number One,
you had to feel your way along the hall in complete darkness, until your
foot struck something; then you knew you had reached the stairs and you
began to climb. It was just as well to feel along the damp wall as you
went, for somebody was always leaving things on the steps for people to
stumble over.

Nance groped her way cautiously, resting her bucket every few steps and
taking a lively interest in the sounds and smells that came from behind
the various closed doors she passed. She knew from the angry voices on
the first floor that Mr. Smelts had come home "as usual"; she knew who
was having sauerkraut for supper, and whose bread was burning.

The odor of cooking food reminded her of something. The hall was dark and
the beer can full, so she sat down at the top of the first flight and,
putting her lips to the foaming bucket was about to drink, when the door
behind her opened and a keen-faced young Jew peered out.

"Say, Nance," he whispered curiously, "have they swore out the warrant
on you yet?"

Nance put down the bucket and looked up at him with a fine air of
unconcern.

"Don't know and don't keer!" she said. "Where was you hidin' at, when the
fight was goin' on?"

"Getting my lessons. Did the cop pinch the Clarke guy?"

"You betcher," said Nance. "You orter seen the way he took on! Begged to
beat the band. Me and Danny never. Me and him--"

A volley of curses came from the hall below, the sound of a blow,
followed by a woman's faint scream of protest, then a door slammed.

"If I was Mis' Smelts," said Nance darkly, with a look that was too old
for ten years, "I wouldn't stand for that. I wouldn't let no man hit me.
I'd get him sent up. I--"

"You walk yourself up them steps, Nance Molloy!" commanded Mrs. Snawdor's
rasping voice from the floor above. "I ain't got no time to be waitin'
while you gas with Ike Lavinsky."

Nance, thus admonished, obeyed orders, arriving on the domestic hearth in
time to prevent the soup from boiling over. Mr. Snawdor, wearing a long
apron and an expression of tragic doom, was trying to set the table,
while over and above and beneath him surged his turbulent offspring. In a
broken rocking-chair, fanning herself with a box-top, sat Mrs. Snawdor,
indulging herself in a continuous stream of conversation and apparently
undisturbed by the uproar around her. Mrs. Snawdor was not sensitive to
discord. As a necessary adjustment to their environment, her nerves had
become soundproof.

"You certainly missed it by not being here!" she was saying to Mr.
Snawdor. "It was one of the liveliest mix-ups ever I seen! One of them
rich boys bust the cathedral window. Some say it'll cost over a thousan'
dollars to git it fixed. An' I pray to God his paw'll have to pay every
cent of it!"

"Can't you make William J. and Rosy stop that racket?" queried Mr.
Snawdor, plaintively. The twins had been named at a time when Mrs.
Snawdor's loyalty was wavering between the President and another
distinguished statesman with whom she associated the promising phrase,
"free silver." The arrival of two babies made a choice unnecessary, and,
notwithstanding the fact that one of them was a girl, she named them
William J. and Roosevelt, reluctantly abbreviating the latter to "Rosy."

"They ain't hurtin' nothin'," she said, impatient of the interruption to
her story. "I wisht you might 'a' seen that ole fool Mason a-lordin' it
aroun', an' that little devil Nance a-takin' him off to the life.
Everybody nearly died a-laughin' at her. But he says he's goin' to have
her up in court, an' I ain't got a blessed thing to wear 'cept that ole
hat of yours I trimmed up. Looks like a shame fer a woman never to be
fixed to go nowhere!"

Mr. Snawdor, who had been trying ineffectually to get in a word, took
this remark personally and in muttering tones called Heaven to witness
that it was none of his fault that she didn't have the right clothes, and
that it was a pretty kind of a world that would keep a man from gettin'
on just because he was honest, and--

"Oh, shut up!" said Mrs. Snawdor, unfeelingly; "it ain't yer lack of
work that gits on my nerves; it's yer bein' 'round. I'd pay anybody a
quarter a week to keep yer busy!"

Nance, during this exchange of conjugal infelicities, assisted by Lobelia
and Fidy, was rescuing sufficient dishes from the kitchen sink to serve
for the evening meal. She, too, was finding it difficult to bring her
attention to bear on domestic matters after the exciting events of the
afternoon.

"An' he says to me,"--she was recounting with dramatic intensity to her
admiring audience--"he says, 'Keep offen that concrete.' An' I says,
'It'll take somebody bigger'n you to make me!'"

Now, of course, we know that Nance never said that, but it was what she
wished she had said, which, at certain moments in life, seems to the best
of us to be quite the same thing.

"Then what?" said Fidy, with a plate suspended in air.

"Then," said Nance with sparkling eyes, "I sticks my foot right in the
middle of their old concrete, an' they comes pilin' offen the fence, an'
Dan Lewis he--"

"You Nance!" came in warning tones from the other room, "you shet your
head an' git on with that supper. Here comes your Uncle Jed this minute!"

At this announcement Nance dropped her dish towel, and dashing to the
door flung herself into the arms of a short, fat, baldheaded man who had
just come out of the front room across the hall.

"Easy there!" warned the new-comer. "You ain't aimin' to butt the engine
clean offen the track, air yer?"

Nance got his arm around her neck, and her arm around his knees, and thus
entwined they made their way to the table.

Uncle Jed Burks, uncle by courtesy, was a boarder by day and a
gate-tender by night at the signal tower at the railroad crossing. On
that day long ago when he had found himself a widower, helpless in the
face of domestic problems, he had accepted Mrs. Snawdor's prompt offer of
hospitality and come across the hall for his meals. At the end of the
week he had been allowed to show his gratitude by paying the rent, and by
the end of the month he had become the chief prop of the family. It is
difficult to conceive of an Atlas choosing to burden himself with the
world, but there are temperaments that seek responsibilities just as
there are those, like Mr. Snawdor, who refuse them.

Through endless discomforts, Uncle Jed had stayed on, coaxing Mr. Snawdor
into an acceptance of his lot, helping Mrs. Snawdor over financial
difficulties, and bestowing upon the little Snawdors the affection which
they failed to elicit from either the maternal or the paternal bosom. And
the amazing thing was that Uncle Jed always thought he was receiving
favors instead of conferring them.

"What's this I hear about my little partner gittin' into trouble?" he
asked, catching Nance's chin in his palm and turning her smudged, excited
face up to his.

Nance's eyes fell before his glance. For the first time since the fight
her pride was mingled with misgiving. But when Mrs. Snawdor plunged into
a fresh recital of the affair, with evident approval of the part she had
played, her self-esteem returned.

"And you say Mason's fixin' to send her up to the juvenile court?" asked
Uncle Jed gravely, his fat hand closing on her small one.

"Dan Lewis has got to go too!" said Nance, a sudden apprehension seizing
her at Uncle Jed's solemn face.

"Oh, they won't do nothin' to 'em," said Mrs. Snawdor, pouring hot water
over the coffee grounds and shaking the pot vigorously. "Everybody knows
it was the Clarke boy that bust the window. Clarke's Bottle Works' son,
you know, up there on Zender Street."

"Was it the Clarke boy and Dan Lewis that started the fracas?" asked
Uncle Jed.

"No, it was me!" put in Nance.

"Now, Nance Molloy, you lemme hear you say that one time more, an' you
know what'll happen!" said Mrs. Snawdor, impressively. "You're fixin' to
make me pay a fine."

"I'm mighty sorry Dan Lewis is mixed up in it," said Uncle Jed, shaking
his head. "This here's his second offense. He was had up last year."

"An' can you wonder?" asked Mrs. Snawdor, "with his mother what she is?"

"Mrs. Lewis ain't a bad looker," Mr. Snawdor roused himself to observe
dejectedly.

His wife turned upon him indignantly. "Well, it's a pity she ain't as
good as her looks then. Fer my part I can't see it's to any woman's
credit to look nice when she's got the right kind of a switch and a good
set of false teeth. It's the woman that keeps her good looks without none
of them luxuries that orter be praised."

"Mrs. Lewis ain't done her part by Dan," said Uncle Jed, seating himself
at the red-clothed table.

"I should say she ain't," Mrs. Snawdor continued. "I never seen nothin'
more pathetical than that there boy when he was no more than three years
old, a-tryin' to feed hisself outer the garbage can, an' her a comin an'
a goin' in the alley all these years with her nose in the air, too good
to speak to anybody."

"Dan don't think his mother's bad to him," said Nance. "He saved up his
shoe-shine money an' bought her some perfumery. He lemme smell it."

"Oh, yes!" said Mrs. Snawdor, "she's got to have her perfumery, an' her
feather in her hat, an' the whitewash on her face, no matter if Dan's
feet are on the groun', an' his naked hide shinin' through his shirt."

"Well, I wish him an' this here little girl wasn't mixed up in this
business," repeated Uncle Jed. "Courts ain't no place fer children. Seems
like I can't stand fer our little Nance to be mixin' up with shady
characters."

Nance shot an apprehensive glance at him and began to look anxious. She
had never seen Uncle Jed so solemn before.

"You jes' remember this here, Nancy," went on the signalman, who could no
more refrain from pointing a moral when the chance presented itself, than
a gun can help going off when the trigger is pulled; "nothin' good ever
comes from breakin' laws. They wouldn't a-been made into laws if they
wasn't fer our good, an' even when we don't see no reason in keepin' 'em,
we ain't got no more right to break through than one of them engines up
at the crossing's got a right to come ahead when I signals it from the
tower to stop. I been handin' out laws to engines fer goin' on thirty
year, an' I never seen one yet that bust over a law that didn't come to
grief. You keep on the track, Sister, an' watch the signals an' obey
orders an' you'll find it pays in the end. An' now, buck up, an' don't be
scared. We'll see what we can do to git you off."

"Who's skeered?" said Nance, with a defiant toss of her head. "I ain't
skeered of nothin'."

But that night when Mrs. Snawdor and Uncle Jed had gone to work, and Mr.
Snawdor had betaken himself out of ear-shot of the wailing baby, Nance's
courage began to waver. After she had finished her work and crawled into
bed between Fidy and Lobelia, the juvenile court, with its unknown
terrors, rose before her. All the excitement of the day died out; her
pride in sharing the punishment with Dan Lewis vanished. She lay staring
up into the darkness, swallowing valiantly to keep down the sobs,
fiercely resolved not to let her bed-fellows witness the break-down of
her courage.

"What's the matter, Nance?" asked Fidy.

"I'm hot!" said Nance, crossly. "It feels like the inside of a
oven in here!"

"I bet Maw forgot to open the window into the shaft," said Fidy.

"Windows don't do no good," said Nance; "they just let in smells. Wisht I
was a man! You bet I would be up at Slap Jack's! I'd set under a 'lectric
fan, an' pour cold things down me an' listen at the 'phoney-graf ever'
night. Hush! Is that our baby?"

A faint wail made her scramble out of bed and rush into the back room
where she gathered a hot, squirming bundle into her arms and peered
anxiously into its wizened face. She knew the trick babies had of dying
when the weather was hot! Two other beloved scraps of humanity had been
taken away from her, and she was fiercely determined to keep this one.
Lugging the baby to the window, she scrambled over the sill.

The fire-escape was cluttered with all the paraphernalia that doubles the
casualty of a tenement fire, but she cleared a space with her foot and
sat down on the top step. Beside her loomed the blank warehouse wall, and
from the narrow passage-way below came the smell of garbage. The clanging
of cars and the rumbling of trucks mingled with the nearer sounds of
whirring sewing machines in Lavinski's sweat-shop on the floor below.
From somewhere around the corner came, at intervals, the sharp cry of a
woman in agony. With that last sound Nance was all too familiar. The
coming and going of a human life were no mystery to her. But each time
the cry of pain rang out she tried in vain to stop her ears. At last,
hot, hungry, lonesome, and afraid, she laid her dirty face against the
baby's fuzzy head and they sobbed together in undisturbed misery.

When at last the child fell into a restless sleep, Nance sat patiently
on, her small arms stiffening under their burden, and her bare feet and
legs smarting from the stings of hungry mosquitos.

By and by the limp garments on the clothes line overhead began to stir,
and Nance, lifting her head gratefully to the vagrant breeze, caught her
breath. There, just above the cathedral spire, white and cool among
fleecy clouds, rose the full August moon. It was the same moon that at
that moment was turning ocean waves into silver magic; that was smiling
on sleeping forests and wind-swept mountains and dancing streams. Yet
here it was actually taking the trouble to peep around the cathedral
spire and send the full flood of its radiance into the most sordid
corners of Calvary Alley, even into the unawakened soul of the dirty,
ragged, tear-stained little girl clasping the sick baby on Snawdor's
fire-escape.

[Illustration: "Her tense muscles relaxed; she forgot to cry"]

Something in Nance responded. Her tense muscles relaxed; she forgot to
cry. With eyes grown big and wistful, she watched the shining orb. All
the bravado, the fear, and rebellion died out of her, and in hushed
wonder she got from the great white night what God in heaven meant for
us to get.




CHAPTER III

THE CLARKES AT HOME


While the prodigal son of the house of Clarke was engaged in breaking
stained-glass windows in Calvary Alley, his mother was at home
entertaining the bishop with a recital of his virtues and
accomplishments. Considering the fact that Bishop Bland's dislike for
children was notorious, he was bearing the present ordeal with unusual
fortitude.

They were sitting on the spacious piazza at Hill-crest, the country
home of the Clarkes, the massive foundation of which was popularly
supposed to rest upon bottles. It was a piazza especially designed to
offset the discomforts of a Southern August afternoon and to make a
visitor, especially if he happened to be an ecclesiastical potentate
with a taste for luxury, loath to forsake its pleasant shade for the
glaring world without.

"Yes, yes," he agreed for the fourth time, "a very fine boy. I must say I
give myself some credit for your marriage and its successful result."

Mrs. Clarke paused in her tea-pouring and gazed absently off across the
tree tops.

"I suppose I ought to be happy," she said, and she sighed.

"Every heart knoweth its own--two lumps, thank you, and a dash of rum. I
was saying--Oh, yes! I was about to remark that we are all prone to
magnify our troubles. Now here you are, after all these years, still
brooding over your unfortunate father, when he is probably long since
returned to France, quite well and happy."

"If I could only be sure. It has been so long since we heard, nearly
thirteen years! The last letter was the one you got when Mac was born."

"Yes, and I answered him in detail, assuring him of your complete
recovery, and expressing my hope that he would never again burden you
until with God's help he had mastered the sin that had been his undoing."

Mrs. Clarke shook her head impatiently.

"You and Macpherson never understood about father. He came to this
country without a friend or a relation except mother and me. Then she
died, and he worked day and night to keep me in a good boarding-school,
and to give me every advantage that a girl could have. Then his health
broke, and he couldn't sleep, and he began taking drugs. Oh, I don't see
how anybody could blame him, after all he had been through!"

"For whatever sacrifices he made, he was amply rewarded," the bishop
said. "Few fathers have the satisfaction of seeing their daughters more
successfully established in life."

"Yes, but what has it all come to for him? Made to feel his disgrace,
aware of Macpherson's constant disapproval--I don't wonder he chose to
give me up entirely."

"It was much the best course for all concerned," said the bishop, with
the assured tone of one who enjoys the full confidence of Providence.
"The fact that he had made shipwreck of his own life was no reason for
him to make shipwreck of yours. I remember saying those very words to
him when he told me of Mr. Clarke's attitude. Painful as was your
decision, you did quite right in yielding to our judgment in the matter
and letting him go."

"But Macpherson ought not to have asked it of me. He's so good and kind
and good about most things, that I don't see how he could have felt the
way he did about father."

The bishop laid a consoling hand on her arm.

"Your husband was but protecting you and himself against untold
annoyance. Think of what it would have meant for a man of Mr. Clarke's
position to have a person of your father's habits a member of his
household!"

"But father was perfectly gentle and harmless--more like an afflicted
child than anything else. When he was without an engagement he would go
for weeks at a time, happy with his books and his music, without
breaking over at all."

"Ah, yes! But what about the influence of his example on your growing
son? Imagine the humiliation to your child."

Mrs. Clarke's vulnerable spot was touched.

"I had forgotten Mac!" she said. "He must be my first consideration,
mustn't he? I never intend for him to bear any burden that I can bear for
him. And yet, how father would have adored him, how proud he would have
been of his voice! But there, you must forgive me for bringing up this
painful subject. It is only when I think of father getting old and being
ill, possibly in want, with nobody in the world--"

"Now, now, my dear lady," said the bishop, "you are indulging in morbid
fancies. Your father knows that with a stroke of the pen he can procure
all the financial assistance from you he may desire. As to his being
unhappy, I doubt it extremely. My recollection of him is of a very
placid, amiable man living more in his dreams than in reality."

Mrs. Clarke smiled through her tears.

"You are quite right. He didn't ask much of life. A book in his hand and
a child on his knee meant happiness for him."

"And those he can have wherever he is," said her spiritual adviser. "Now
I want you to turn away from all these gloomy forebodings and leave the
matter entirely in God's hands."

"And you think I have done my duty?"

"Assuredly. It is your poor father who has failed to do his. You are a
model wife and an almost too devoted mother. You are zealous in your work
at the cathedral; you--"

"There!" said Mrs. Clarke, smiling, "I know I don't deserve all those
compliments, but they do help me. Now let's talk of something else while
I give you a fresh cup of tea. Tell me what the board did yesterday about
the foreign mission fund."

The bishop, relieved to see the conversation drifting into calmer waters,
accepted the second cup and the change of topic with equal satisfaction.
His specialty was ministering to the sorrows of the very rich, but he
preferred to confine his spiritual visits to the early part of the
afternoon, leaving the latter part free for tea-drinking and the
ecclesiastical gossip so dear to his heart.

"Well," he said, leaning back luxuriously in his deep willow chair,
"we carried our point after some difficulty. Too many of our good
directors take refuge in the old excuse that charity should begin at
home. It should, my dear Elise, but as I have said before, it should
not end there!"

Having delivered himself of this original observation, the bishop helped
himself to another sandwich.

"The special object of my present visit," he said, "aside from the
pleasure it always gives me to be in your delightful home, is to interest
you and your good husband in a mission we are starting in Mukden, a most
ungodly place, I fear, in Manchuria. A thousand dollars from Mr. Clarke
at this time would be most acceptable, and I shall leave it to you, my
dear lady, to put the matter before him, with all the tact and persuasion
for which you are so justly noted."

Mrs. Clarke smiled wearily.

"I will do what I can, Bishop. But I hate to burden him with one more
demand. Since he has bought these two new factories, he is simply worked
to death. I get so cross with all the unreasonable demands the employees
make on him. They are never satisfied. The more he yields, the more they
demand. It's begging letters, petitions, lawsuits, strikes, until he is
driven almost crazy."

The whirr of an approaching motor caused them both to look up. A grizzled
man of fifty got out and, after a decisive order to the chauffeur, turned
to join them. His movements were quick and nervous, and his eyes restless
under their shaggy gray brows.

"Where's the boy?" was his first query after the greetings were over.

"He went to choir practice. I thought surely he would come out with you.
Hadn't we better send the machine back for him?"

"We were just speaking of that fine lad of yours," said the bishop,
helping himself to yet another sandwich. "Fine eyes, frank, engaging
manner! I suppose he is too young yet for you to be considering his
future calling?"

"Indeed he isn't!" said Mrs. Clarke. "My heart is set on the law. Two of
his Clarke grandfathers have been on the bench."

Mr. Clarke smiled somewhat grimly.

"Mac hasn't evinced any burning ambition in any direction as yet."

"Mac is only thirteen," said Mrs. Clarke with dignity; "all of his
teachers will tell you that he is wonderfully bright, but that he lacks
application. I think it is entirely their fault. They don't make the
lessons sufficiently interesting; they don't hold his attention. He has
been at three private schools, and they were all wretched. You know I am
thinking of trying a tutor this year."

"I want her to send him to the public schools," Mr. Clarke said with the
air of detached paternity peculiar to American fathers. "I went to the
public schools. They gave me a decent start in life; that's about all you
can expect of a school."

"True, true," said the bishop, his elbows on the arms of his chair, and
his fingers tapping each other meditatively. "I am the last person to
minimize the value of the public schools, but they were primarily
designed, Mr. Clarke, neither for your boy, nor mine. Their rules and
regulations were designed expressly for the children of the poor. I was
speaking on this subject only yesterday to Mrs. Conningsby Lee. She's
very indignant because her child was forced to submit to vaccination at
the hands of some unknown young physician appointed by the city.

"I should feel like killing any one who vaccinated Mac without my
consent!" exclaimed Mrs. Clarke, "but I needn't worry. He wouldn't allow
it. Do you know we have never been able to persuade that child to be
vaccinated?"

"And you don't propose for the State to do what you can't do, do you?"
Mr. Clarke said, pinching her cheek.

"What Mrs. Clarke says is not without weight," said the bishop, gallantly
coming to her rescue. "There are few things upon which I wax more
indignant than the increasing interference of the State with the home.
This hysterical agitation against child labor, for instance; while
warranted in exceptional cases, it is in the main destructive of the
formation of the habit of industry which cannot be acquired too young.
When the State presumes to teach a mother how to feed her child, when and
where to educate it, when and where to send it to work, the State goes
too far. There is nothing more dangerous to the family than the present
paternalistic and pauperizing trend of legislation."

"I wish you would preach that to the factory inspectors," said Mr.
Clarke, with a wry smile. "Between the poor mothers who are constantly
trying to get the children into the factory, and the inspectors who are
trying to keep them out, I have my hands full."

"A mother's love," said the bishop, who evidently had different rules
for mothers and fathers, "a mother's intuition is the most unerring
guide for the conduct of her child; and the home, however humble, is its
safest refuge."

Mrs. Clarke glanced anxiously down the poplar-bordered driveway. Her
mother's intuition suggested that as it was now five-thirty, Mac must
have been engaged in some more diverting pastime than praising the Lord
with psalms and thanksgiving.

"Your theory then, Bishop," said Mr. Clarke, who was evincing an unusual
interest in the subject, "carried to its legitimate conclusion, would do
away with all state interference? No compulsory education or child-labor
laws, or houses of correction?"

"Oh, I don't think the bishop means that at all!" said Mrs. Clarke. "But
he is perfectly right about a mother knowing what is best for her child.
Take Mac, for instance. Nobody has ever understood him, but me. What
other people call wilfulness is really sensitiveness. He can't bear to be
criticized, he--"

The sudden appearance of a limping object skirting the bushes caused her
to break off abruptly.

"Who on earth is that over there beyond the fountain?" she asked. "Why,
upon my word, it's Mac!--Mac!" she called anxiously. "Come here!"

The boy shamefacedly retraced his steps and presented himself on the
piazza. His shoes and stockings were covered with mud; the frills on his
shirt were torn and dirty; one eye was closed.

"Why, my darling child!" cried his mother, her listless, detached air
giving place to one of acute concern, "you've been in an accident!"

She had flown to him and enveloped him, mud and all, in her gauzy
embrace--an embrace from which Mac struggled to escape.

"I'm all right," he insisted impatiently. "Those kids back of the
cathedral got to bothering us, and we--"

"You mean those rowdies in the alley of whom Mason is always
complaining?" demanded the bishop, sternly.

"Yes, sir. They were throwing rocks and stepping on the new walk--"

"And you were helping the janitor keep them out?" broke in Mrs. Clarke.
"Isn't it an outrage, Bishop, that these children can't go to their choir
practice without being attacked by those dreadful ruffians?"

"You are quite sure you boys weren't to blame?" asked Mr. Clarke.

"Now, Father!" protested his wife, "how can you? When Mac has just told
us he was helping the janitor?"

"It is no new thing, Mr. Clarke," said the bishop, solemnly shaking his
head. "We have had to contend with that disreputable element back of us
for years. On two occasions I have had to complain to the city
authorities. A very bad neighborhood, I am told, very bad indeed."

"But, Mac dearest," pursued his mother anxiously as she tried to brush
the dried mud out of his hair. "Were you the only boy who stayed to help
Mason keep them out?"

Mac jerked his head away irritably.

"Oh! It wasn't that way, Mother. You see--"

"That's Mac all over," cried Mrs. Clarke. "He wouldn't claim any credit
for the world. But look at the poor child's hands! Look at his eye! We
must take some action at once. Can't we swear out a warrant or something
against those hoodlums, and have them locked up?"

"But, Elise," suggested Mr. Clarke, quizzically, "haven't you and the
bishop just been arguing that the State ought not to interfere with a
child? That the family ties, the mother's guidance--"

"My dear Mr. Clarke," interrupted the bishop, "this, I assure you, is an
exceptional case. These young desperados are destroying property; they
are lawbreakers, many of them doubtless, incipient criminals. Mrs. Clarke
is quite right; some action must be taken, has probably been taken
already. The janitor had instructions to swear out a warrant against the
next offender who in any way defaced the property belonging to the
cathedral."

It was at this critical point that the telephone rang, and a maid
appeared to say that Mr. Clarke was wanted. The bishop took advantage of
the interruption to order his carriage and make his adieus.

"You may be assured," he said at parting, "that I shall not allow this
matter to rest until the offenders are brought to justice. Good-by,
good-by, my little man. Bear in mind, my dear Elise, that Mukden
matter. Good-by."

"And now, you poor darling!" said Mrs. Clarke in a relieved tone, as she
turned her undivided attention on her abused son, "you shall have a nice
hot bath and a compress on the poor eye, and whatever you want for your
dinner. You are as white as a sheet, and still trembling! You poor lamb!"

Mr. Clarke met them at the drawing-room door:

"Mac!" he demanded, and his face was stern, "did you have anything to do
with the breaking of the big window at the cathedral?"

"No, sir," Mac faltered, kicking at the newel post.

"You didn't even know it was broken?"

"Oh, everybody was throwing rocks, and that old, crazy Mason--"

"But I thought you were helping Mason?"

"I was--that is--those alley micks--"

"That will do!" his father said angrily. "I've just been notified to have
you at the juvenile court next Friday to answer a charge of destroying
property. This is a nice scrape for my son to get into! And you didn't
have the grit to tell the truth. You lied to me! You'll go to bed, sir,
without your dinner!"

Mrs. Clarke's eyes were round with indignation, and she was on the point
of bursting into passionate protest when a warning glance from her
husband silenced her. With a sense of outraged maternity she flung a
protective arm about her son and swept him up the stairs.

"Don't make a scene, Mac darling!" she whispered. "Mother knows you
didn't do it. You go up to bed like a little gentleman, and I'll slip a
tray up to you and come up myself the minute dinner is over."

That night when the moon discovered Nance Molloy in Calvary Alley, it
also peeped through the window at Mac Clarke out at Hillcrest. Bathed,
combed, and comforted, he lay in a silk-draped bed while his mother sat
beside him fanning him. It would be pleasant to record that the prodigal
had confessed his sins and been forgiven. It would even be some comfort
to state that his guilty conscience was keeping him awake. Neither of
these facts, however, was true. Mac, lying on his back, watching the
square patch of moonlight on the floor, was planning darkest deeds of
vengeance on a certain dirty, tow-headed, bare-legged little girl, who
had twice got the better of him in the conflict of the day.




CHAPTER IV

JUVENILE COURT


The goddess of justice is popularly supposed to bandage her eyes in order
to maintain an impartial attitude, but it is quite possible that she does
it to keep from seeing the dreary court-rooms which are supposed to be
her abiding place.

On the hot Friday morning following the fight, the big anteroom to the
juvenile court, which was formerly used for the police court, was just as
dirty and the air just as stale as in mid-winter, when the windows were
down and the furnace going.

Scrub women came at dawn, to be sure, and smeared its floors with sour
mops, and occasionally a janitor brushed the cobwebs off the ceiling, but
the grime was more than surface deep, and every nook and cranny held the
foul odor of the unwashed, unkempt current of humanity that for so many
years had flowed through it. Ghosts of dead and gone criminals seemed to
hover over the place, drawn back through curiosity, to relive their own
sorry experiences in the cases of the young offenders waiting before the
bar of justice.

On the bench at the rear of the room the delegation from Calvary Alley
had been waiting for over an hour. Mrs. Snawdor, despite her forebodings,
had achieved a costume worthy of the occasion, but Uncle Jed and Dan had
made no pretense at a toilet. As for Nance, she had washed her face as
far east and west as her ears and as far south as her chin; but the
regions beyond were unreclaimed. The shoe-string on her hair had been
replaced by a magenta ribbon, but the thick braids had not been
disturbed. Now that she had got over her fright, she was rather enjoying
the novelty and excitement of the affair. She had broken the law and
enjoyed breaking it, and the cop had pinched her. It was a game between
her and the cop, and the cop had won. She saw no reason whatever for
Uncle Jed and Dan to look so solemn.

By and by a woman in spectacles took her into a small room across the
hall, and told her to sit on the other side of the table and not to
shuffle her feet. Nance explained about the mosquito bites, but the lady
did not listen.

"What day is this?" asked the spectacled one, preparing to chronicle the
answers in a big book.

"Friday," said Nance, surprised that she could furnish information to so
wise a person.

"What day of the month?"

"Day before rent day."

The corner of the lady's mouth twitched, and Nance glanced at her
suspiciously.

"Can you repeat these numbers after me? Four, seven, nine, three, ten,
six, fourteen."

Nance was convinced now that the lady was crazy, but she rattled them
off glibly.

"Very good! Now if the little hand of your clock was at twelve, and the
big hand at three, what time would it be?"

Nance pondered the matter deeply.

"Five after twelve!" she answered triumphantly.

"No; try again."

Nance was eager to oblige, but she had the courage of her convictions and
held her point.

"Wouldn't it be a quarter past?" suggested the examiner.

"No, ma'am, it wouldn't. Our clock runs ten minutes slow."

The grave face behind the spectacles broke into a smile; then business
was resumed.

"Shut your eyes and name as many objects as you can without stopping,
like this: trees, flowers, birds. Go ahead."

"Trees, flowers, birds, cats, dogs, fight, barrel, slop, mud, ashes."

"Go on, quicker--keep it up. Nuts, raisins, cake--"

"Cake, stove, smoke, tub, wash-board, scrub, rag, tub, stove, ashes."

"Keep it up!"

"I dunno no more."

"We can't get beyond ashes, eh?" said the lady. "Now suppose you tell me
what the following words mean. Charity?"

"Is it a organization?" asked Nance doubtfully.

"Justice?"

"I dunno that one."

"Do you know what God is?"

Nance felt that she was doing badly. If her freedom depended on her
passing this test, she knew the prison bars must be already closing on
her. She no more knew what God is than you or I know, but the spectacled
lady must be answered at any cost.

"God," she said laboriously, "God is what made us, and a cuss word."

Many more questions followed before she was sent back to her place
between Uncle Jed and Mrs. Snawdor, and Dan was led away in turn to
receive his test.

Meanwhile Uncle Jed was getting restless. Again and again he consulted
his large nickel-plated watch.

"I ought to be getting to bed," he complained. "I won't get more 'n four
hours' sleep as it is."

"Here comes the Clarke boy!" exclaimed Nance, and all eyes were turned in
the direction of the door.

The group that presented itself at the entrance was in sharp contrast to
its surroundings. Mac Clarke, arrayed in immaculate white, was flanked on
one side by his distinguished-looking father and on the other by his
father's distinguished-looking lawyer. The only evidence that the
aristocratic youth had ever come into contact with the riffraff of
Calvary Alley was the small patch of court-plaster above his right eye.

"Tell the judge we are here," said Mr. Clarke briskly to his lawyer. "Ask
him to get through with us as soon as possible. I have an appointment at
twelve-thirty."

The lawyer made his way up the aisle and disappeared through the
door which all the morning had been swallowing one small offender
after another.

Almost immediately a loud voice called from the platform:

"Case of Mac Clarke! Nance Molloy! Dan Lewis!" And Nance with a sudden
leap of her heart, knew that her time had come.

In the inner room, where the juvenile cases had a private hearing, the
judge sat at a big desk, scanning several pages of type-written paper. He
was a young judge with a keen, though somewhat weary, face and eyes, full
of compassionate knowledge. But Nance did not see the judge; her gaze was
riveted upon her two arch enemies: Mason, with his flat nose and
pugnacious jaw, and "Old Cock-eye," the policeman who looked strangely
unfamiliar with his helmet off.

"Well, Mr. Mason," said the judge when the three small offenders had
been ranged in front of the desk, with the witnesses grouped behind them,
"I'll ask you to tell me just what took place last Saturday afternoon at
the cathedral."

Mason cleared his throat and, with evident satisfaction, proceeded to set
forth his version of the story:

"I was sweeping out the vestibule, your Honor, when I heard a lot of
yelling and knew that a fight was on. It's that away every Saturday
afternoon that I ain't on the spot to stop it. I run down through the
cathedral and out to the back gate. The alley was swarming with a mob of
fighting, yelling children. Then I see these two boys a-fighting each
other up at the end of the alley, and before I can get to 'em, this here
little girl flings herself between 'em, and the big boy picks up a rock
and heaves it straight th'u the cathedral window."

"Well, Mac," said the judge, turning to the trim, white-clad figure
confronting him--a figure strangely different from the type that
usually stood there. "You have heard what the janitor charges you with.
Are you guilty?"

"Yes, sir," said Mac.

"The breaking of the window was an accident?"

Mac glanced quickly at his father's lawyer, then back at the judge.

"Yes, sir."

"But you were fighting in the alley?"

"I was keeping the alley boys out of the cathedral yard."

"That's a lie!" came in shrill, indignant tones from the little girl at
his elbow.

"There seems to be some difference of opinion here," said the judge,
putting his hand over his mouth to repress a smile at the vehemence of
the accusation. "Suppose we let this young lady give her version of it."

Nance jerking her arm free from Mrs. Snawdor's restraining hand, plunged
breathlessly into her story.

"He was settin' on the fence, along with a parcel of other guys, a-makin'
faces an' callin' names long afore we even took no notice of 'em."

"Both sides is to blame, your Honor," interposed Mason, "there ain't a
day when the choir rehearses that I don't have to go out and stop 'em
fighting."

"Well, in this case who started the trouble?" asked the judge.

Mrs. Snawdor clutched at Nance, but it was too late.

"I did," she announced.

The judge looked puzzled.

"Why, I thought you said the choir boys began it by sitting on the fence
and making faces and calling names."

"Shucks," said Nance, contemptuously, "we kin beat 'em makin' faces an'
callin' names."

"Well, how did you start the fight?"

"That there big boy dared me to step in the concrete. Didn't you now?"

Mac stood looking straight ahead of him and refused to acknowledge
her presence.

"It strikes me," said the judge, "that you choir boys could be better
employed than in teasing and provoking the children in the alley. What do
you think, Mac?"

Mac had been provided with no answer to this question, so he
offered none.

"Unfortunately," the judge continued, "it is the fathers of boys like you
who have to take the punishment. Your father will have to pay for the
window. But I want to appeal to your common sense and your sense of
justice. Look at me, Mac. You have had advantages and opportunities
beyond most boys. You are older than these children. Don't you think,
instead of using your influence to stir up trouble and put us to this
annoyance and expense, it would be much better for you to keep on your
side of the fence and leave these people back of the cathedral alone?"

"Yes, sir," said Mac, perfunctorily.

"And you promise me to do this?"

"Yes, sir."

"We will give you a chance to make your promise good. But remember your
name is on our record; if there is any more trouble whatever, you will
hear from us. Mr. Clarke, I look to you to see that your son behaves
himself. You may step aside please. And now, boy, what is your name?"

"Dan Lewis."

"Oh, yes. I think we have met before. What have you to say for yourself?"

The shoeless, capless, unwashed boy, with his ragged trousers hitched to
his shoulders by one suspender, frowned up at the judge through a fringe
of tumbled hair.

"Nothin'," he said doggedly.

"Where do you live?"

"I live at home when me maw's there."

"Where is she now?"

This question caused considerable nudging and side-glancing on the part
of Mrs. Snawdor.

"She's went to the country," said Dan.

"Is your father living?"

"I dunno."

"Did you go to school last year?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Didn't have no shoes."

"Does your mother work?"

This question brought more nudges and glances from Mrs. Snawdor, none of
which were lost on the boy.

"Me mother don't have to work," he said defiantly. "She's a lady."

The judge cleared his throat and called Mrs. Snawdor sharply to order.

"Well, Dan," he said, "I am sorry to see you back here again. What were
you up for before?"

"Chuckin' dice."

"And didn't I tell you that it would go hard with you if you came back?"

"Yes, sir, but I never chucked no more dice."

"And I suppose in spite of the way your mouth is bruised, you'll tell me
you weren't mixed up in this fight?"

The boy stood staring miserably at the wall with eyes in which fear and
hurt pride struggled for mastery.

"Yer Honor!" the policeman broke in. "It's three times lately I've found
him sleepin' in doorways after midnight. Him and the gang is a bad lot,
yer Honor, a scrappin' an' hoppin' freights an' swipin' junk, an' one
thing an' another."

"I never swiped no junk," Dan said hopelessly, "I never swiped nothink
in my life."

"Is there no definite charge against this boy?"

"Well, sir," said Mason, "he is always a-climbin' up the steeple of the
cathedral."

Dan, sullen, frightened, and utterly unable to defend himself, looked
from the officer to the janitor with the wide, distrustful eyes of a
cornered coyote.

Suddenly a voice spoke out in his behalf, a shrill, protesting,
passionate voice.

"He ain't no worser nor nobody else! Ast Mammy, ast Uncle Jed! He's got
to sleep somewheres when his maw fergits to come home! Ever'body goes an'
picks on Danny 'cause he ain't got nobody to take up fer him. 'T ain't
fair!" Nance ended her tirade in a burst of tears.

"There, there," said the judge, "it's going to be fair this time. You
stop crying now and tell me your name?"

"Nance Molloy," she gulped, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

"How old are you?"

"'Leven, goin' on twelve."

"Well, take that gum out of your mouth and stop crying."

He consulted his papers and then looked at her over his glasses.

"Nancy," he said, "are you in the habit of slipping into the cathedral
when the janitor is not around?"

"Yes, sir."

"What for?"

"Lookin' at the pretties, an' seein' if there's any nickels under
the seats."

"You want to buy candy, I suppose?"

"No, sir, a bureau."

Even the tired-looking probation officer looked up and smiled.

"What does a little girl like you want with a bureau?" asked the judge.

"So's I won't have to keep me duds under the bed."

"That's a commendable ambition. But what about these other charges;
truancy from school, fighting with the boys, throwing mud, and so on?"

"I never th'ow mud, 'ceptin' when I'm th'owin' back," explained Nance.

"A nice distinction," said the judge. "Is this child's mother present?"

Mrs. Snawdor, like a current that has been restrained too long, surged
eagerly forward, and overflowed her conversational banks completely.

"Well, I ain't exactly her mother, but I'm just the same as her mother.
You ast anybody in Calvary Alley. Ast Mr. Burks here, ast Mrs. Smelts
what I been to her ever since she was a helpless infant baby. When Bud
Molloy lay dyin' he says to the brakeman, 'You tell my wife to be good
to Nance,'"

"So she's your stepchild?"

"Yes, sir, an' Bud Molloy was as clever a man as ever trod shoe-leather.
So was Mr. Yager. Nobody can't say I ever had no trouble with my two
first. They wasn't what you might call as smart a man as Snawdor, but
they wasn't no fool."

It was a peculiarity of Mrs. Snawdor's that she always spoke of her
previous husbands as one, notwithstanding the fact that the virtues
which she attributed to them could easily have been distributed among
half a dozen.

"Well, well," said the judge impatiently, "what have you to say about the
character of this little girl?"

Mrs. Snawdor shifted her last husband's hat from the right side of her
head to the left, and began confidentially:

"Well I'll tell you, Jedge, Nance ain't so bad as whut they make her out.
She's got her faults. I ain't claimin' she ain't. But she ain't got a
drop of meanness in her, an' that's more than I can say for some grown
folks present." Mrs. Snawdor favored Mr. Mason with such a sudden and
blighting glance that the janitor quailed visibly.

"Do you have trouble controlling her?" asked the judge.

"Nothin' to speak of. She's a awful good worker, Nance is, when you git
her down to it. But her trouble is runnin'. Let anything happen in the
alley, an' she's up an' out in the thick of it. I'm jes' as apt to come
home an' find her playin' ball with the baby in her arms, as not. But I
don't have to dress her down near as often as I used to."

"Then you wouldn't say she was a bad child?"

Mrs. Snawdor's emphatic negative was arrested in the utterance by Mr.
Mason's accusing eye.

"Well, I never seen no child that was a angel," she compromised.

"Does Nancy go to school?" the judge asked.

"Well, I was threatenin' her the other day, if she didn't behave herself,
I was goin' to start her in again."

"I ain't been sence Christmas," volunteered Nance, still sniffling.

"You shet yer mouth," requested Mrs. Snawdor with great dignity.

"Why hasn't she been to school since Christmas?" the judge
proceeded sternly.

"Well, to tell you the truth, it was on account of Mr. Snawdor. He got
mad 'bout the vaccination. He don't believe in it. Says it gives you the
rheumatism. He's got a iron ring on ever' one of the childern. Show yours
to the jedge, Nance! He says ef they has to vaccinate 'em to educate 'em,
they ain't goin' to de neither one."

"But don't you know that we have compulsory education in this State?
Hasn't the truant officer been to see you?"

Mrs. Snawdor looked self-conscious and cast down her eyes.

"Well, not as many times as Snawdor says he has. Snawdor's that
jealous he don't want me to have no gentlemen visitors. When I see the
truant officer or the clock-man comin', I just keep out of sight to
avoid trouble."

The judge's eyes twinkled, then grew stern. "In the meanwhile," he said,
"Nancy is growing up in ignorance. What sort of a woman are you to let a
child go as ragged and dirty as this one and to refuse her an education?"

"Well, schools ain't what they wuz when me an' you wuz young," Mrs.
Snawdor said argumentatively. "They no more'n git a child there than they
want to cut out their palets or put spectacles on her. But honest, Judge,
the truth of it is I can't spare Nance to go to school. I got a job
scrubbin' four nights in the week at the post-office, an' I got to have
some help in the daytime. I leave it to you if I ain't."

"That's neither here nor there," said the judge. "It is your business to
have her at school every morning and to see that she submits to the
regulations. You are an able-bodied woman and have an able-bodied
husband. Why don't you move into a decent house in a decent
neighborhood?"

"There ain't nothin' the matter with our neighborhood. If you'd jes' git
'em to fix the house up some. The roof leaks something scandalous."

"Who is your landlord?"

"Well, they tell me _he_ is," said Mrs. Snawdor, pointing a malicious
finger at Mr. Clarke. This _coup d'etat_ caused considerable diversion,
and the judge had to call the court sharply to order.

"Is that your husband in the rear of the room?" he asked Mrs. Snawdor.

"Law, no; that's Mr. Burks, our boarder. I begged Snawdor to come, but
he's bashful."

"Well, Mr. Burks, will you step forward and tell us what you know of this
little girl?"

Uncle Jed cleared his throat, made a pass at the place where his front
hair used to be, and came forward.

"Have you known this child long?" asked the judge.

"Eleven years, going on twelve," said Uncle Jed, with a twinkle in his
small eyes, "me an' her grandpa fought side by side in the battle of
Chickasaw Bluffs."

"So she comes of fighting stock," said the judge. "Do you consider her
incorrigible?"

"Sir?"

"Do you think her stepmother is able to control her?"

Uncle Jed looked a trifle embarrassed.

"Well, Mrs. Snawdor ain't whut you might say regular in her method.
Sometimes she's kinder rough on Nance, and then again she's a heap sight
too easy."

"That's a God's truth!" Mrs. Snawdor agreed fervently from the rear.

"Then you do not consider it altogether the child's fault?"

"No, sir, I can't say as I do. She jes' gits the signals mixed
sometimes, that's all."

The judge smiled.

"So you think if she understood the signals, she'd follow them?"

Uncle Jed's face became very earnest as he laid his hand on Nance's head.

"I believe if this here little lass was to once git it into her head that
a thing was right, she'd do it if it landed her where it landed her paw,
at the foot of a forty-foot embankment with a engine a-top of her."

"That's a pretty good testimony to her character," said the judge. "It's
our business, then, to see that she gets more definite instructions as to
the traffic laws of life. Nance, you and Dan step up here again."

The children stood before him, breathing hard, looking him straight
in the face.

"You have both been breaking the law. It's a serious thing to be up in
court. It is usually the first step on the down grade. But I don't
believe either of you have been wholly to blame. I am going to give you
one more chance and put you both on probation to Mrs. Purdy, to whom you
are to report once a week. Is Mrs. Purdy in the room?"

An elderly little lady slipped forward and stood behind them with a
hand on the shoulder of each. Nance did not dare look around, but there
was something comforting and reassuring in that fat hand that lay on
her shoulder.

"One more complaint against either of you," cautioned the judge
impressively, "and it will be the house of reform. If your families can't
make you behave, the State can. But we don't want to leave it to the
family or the State; we want to leave it to you. I believe you can both
make good, but you'll have to fight for it."

Nance's irregular features broke into a smile. It was a quick, wide smile
and very intimate.

"Fight?" she repeated, with a quizzical look at the judge. "I thought
that was what we was pinched fer."




CHAPTER V

ON PROBATION


For a brief period Nance Molloy walked the paths of righteousness. The
fear of being "took up" proved a salutary influence, but permanent
converts are seldom made through fear of punishment alone. She was trying
by imitation and suggestion to grope her way upward, but the light she
climbed by was a borrowed light which swung far above her head and threw
strange, misleading shadows across her path. The law that allowed a man
to sell her fire-crackers and then punished her for firing them off, that
allowed any passer-by to kick her stone off the hop-scotch square and
punished her for hurling; the stone after him, was a baffling and
difficult thing to understand.

At school it was no better. The truant officer said she must go every
day, yet when she got there, there was no room for her. She had to sit in
the seat with two other little girls who bitterly resented the intrusion.

"You oughtn't to be in this grade anyhow!" declared one of them. "A girl
ought to be in the primer that turns her letters the wrong way."

"Well, my letters spell the words right," said Nance hotly, "an' that's
more'n yours do, Pie-Face!"

Whereupon the girl stuck out her tongue, and Nance promptly shoved her
off the end of the seat, with the result that her presence was requested
in the office at the first recess.

"If you would learn to make your letters right, the girls would not tease
you," said the principal, kindly. "Why do you persist in turning them the
wrong way?"

Now Nance had learned to write by copying the inscriptions from the
reverse side of the cathedral windows, and she still believed the
cathedral was right. But she liked the principal and she wanted very much
to get a good report, so she gave in.

"All right," she said good-naturedly, "I'll do 'em your way. An' ef you
ketch me fightin' agin, I hope you'll lick hell outen me!"

The principal, while decrying its forcible expression, applauded her good
intention, and from that time on took special interest in her.

Nance's greatest drawback these days was Mrs. Snawdor. That worthy lady,
having her chief domestic prop removed and finding the household duties
resting too heavily upon her own shoulders, conceived an overwhelming
hatred for the school, the unknown school-teacher, and the truant
officer, for whom she had hitherto harbored a slightly romantic interest.

"I ain't got a mite of use for the whole lay-out," she announced in a
sweeping condemnation one morning when Nance was reminding her for the
fourth time that she had to have a spelling book. "They' re forever
wantin' somethin'. It ain't no use beginnin' to humor 'em. Wasn't they
after me to put specs on Fidy last week? I know their tricks, standin' in
with eye-doctors an' dentists! An' here I been fer goin' on ten years,
tryin' to save up to have my own eye-teeth drawed an' decent ones put in.
Snawdor promised when we got married that would be his first present to
me. Well, if I ever get 'em, they _will_ be his first present."

"Teacher says you oughtn't to leave the milk settin' uncovered like that;
it gits germans in it," said Nance.

"I'd like to know whose milk-can this is?" demanded Mrs. Snawdor
indignantly. "You tell her when she pays fer my milk, it 'll be time
enough fer her to tell me what to do with it. You needn't be scurryin' so
to git off. I'm fixin' to go to market. You'll have to stay an' 'tend to
the children 'til I git back."

"But I'm tryin' to git a good report," urged Nance. "I don't want
to be late."

"I'll send a excuse by Fidy, an' say you 're sick in bed. Then you kin
stay home all day an' git the house cleaned up."

"Naw, I won't," said Nance rebelliously, "I ain't goin' to miss ag'in."

"You're goin' to shut up this minute, you sass-box, or I'll take you back
to that there juvenile court. Git me a piece o' paper an' a pencil."

With great effort she wrote her note while Nance stood sullenly by,
looking over her shoulder.

"You spelled teacher's name with a little letter," Nance muttered.

"I done it a-purpose," said Mrs. Snawdor vindictively, "I ain't goin' to
spell her with a capital; she ain't worth it."

Nance would undoubtedly have put up a more spirited fight for her rights,
had she not been anxious to preserve peace until the afternoon. It was
the day appointed by the court for her and Dan Lewis to make their first
report to Mrs. Purdy, whose name and address had been given them on a
card. She had washed her one gingham apron for the occasion, and had
sewed up the biggest rent in her stockings. The going forth alone with
Dan on an errand of any nature was an occasion of importance. It somehow
justified those coupled initials, enclosed in a gigantic heart, that she
had surreptitiously drawn on the fence.

After her first disappointment in being kept at home, she set about her
task of cleaning the Snawdor flat with the ardor of a young Hercules
attacking the Augean stables. First she established the twins in the hall
with a string and a bent pin and the beguiling belief that if they fished
long enough over the banister they would catch something. Next she
anchored the screaming baby to a bedpost and reduced him to subjection by
dipping his fingers in sorghum, then giving him a feather. The absorbing
occupation of plucking the feather from one sticky hand to the other
rendered him passive for an hour.

These preliminaries being arranged, Nance turned her attention to the
work in hand. Her method consisted in starting at the kitchen, which was
in front, and driving the debris back, through the dark, little, middle
room, until she landed it all in a formidable mass in Mrs. Snawdor's
bedroom at the rear. This plan, pursued day after day, with the general
understanding that Mrs. Snawdor was going to take a day off soon and
clean up, had resulted in a condition of indescribable chaos. As Mr.
Snawdor and the three younger children slept in the rear room at night,
and Mrs. Snawdor slept in it the better part of the day, the hour for
cleaning seldom arrived.

To-day as Nance stood in the doorway of this stronghold of dirt and
disorder, she paused, broom in hand. The floor, as usual, was littered
with papers and strings, the beds were unmade, the wash-stand and dresser
were piled high with a miscellaneous collection, and the drawers of each
stood open, disgorging their contents. On the walls hung three enlarged
crayons of bridal couples, in which the grooms were different, but the
bride the same. On the dusty window sill were bottles and empty spools,
broken glass chimneys, and the clock that ran ten minutes slow. The
debris not only filled the room, but spilled out into the fire-escape and
down the rickety iron ladders and flowed about the garbage barrels in the
passage below.

It was not this too familiar scene, however, that made Nance pause with
her hand on the door-knob and gaze open-mouthed into the room. It was the
sight of Mr. Snawdor sitting on the side of the bed with his back toward
her, wiping his little red-rimmed eyes on a clean pocket handkerchief,
and patting his trembling mouth with the hand that was not under the
quilt. Heretofore Nance had regarded Mr. Snawdor as just one of the many
discomforts with which the family had to put up. His whining protests
against their way of living had come to be as much a matter of course as
the creaking door or the smoking chimney. Nobody ever thought of
listening to what he was saying, and everybody pushed and ordered him
about, including Nance, who enjoyed using Mrs. Snawdor's highhanded
method with him, when that lady was not present.

But when she saw him sitting there with his back to her, crying, she was
puzzled and disturbed. As she watched, she saw him fumble for something
under the quilt, then lift a shining pistol, and place the muzzle to his
thin, bald temple. With a cry of terror, she dashed forward and knocked
the weapon from his hand.

"You put that down!" she cried, much as she would have commanded William
J. to leave the butcher knife alone. "Do you want to kill yerself?"

Mr. Snawdor started violently, then collapsing beside the bed, confessed
that he did.

"What fer?" asked Nance, terror giving way to sheer amazement.

"I want to quit!" cried Mr. Snawdor, hysterically. "I can't stand it any
longer. I'm a plumb failure and I ain't goin' to ever be anything else.
If your maw had taken care of what I had, we wouldn't have been where we
are at. Look at the way we live! Like pigs in a pen! We're nothing but
pore white trash; that's what we are!"

Nance stood beside him with her hand on his shoulder. Poor white trash!
That was what the Clarke boy had called her. And now Mr. Snawdor, the
nominal head of the family, was acknowledging it to be true. She looked
about her in new and quick concern.

"I'm going to clean up in here, too," she said. "I don't keer whut mammy
says. It'll look better by night; you see if it don't."

"It ain't only that--" said Mr. Snawdor; then he pulled himself up and
looked at her appealingly. "You won't say nuthin' about this mornin',
will you, Nance?"

"Not if you gimme the pistol," said Nance.

When he was gone, she picked up the shining weapon and gingerly dropped
it out on the adjoining roof. Then her knees felt suddenly wobbly, and
she sat down. What if she had been a minute later and Mr. Snawdor had
pulled the trigger? She shivered as her quick imagination pictured the
scene. If Mr. Snawdor felt like that about it, there was but one thing to
do; to get things cleaned up and try to keep them so.

Feeling very important and responsible, she swept and straightened and
dusted, while her mind worked even faster than her nimble hands.
Standards are formed by comparisons, and so far Nance's opportunity for
instituting comparisons had been decidedly limited.

"We ain't pore white, no such a thing!" she kept saying to herself. "Our
house ain't no worser nor nobody else's. Mis' Smelts is just the same,
an' if Levinski's is cleaner, it smells a heap worse."

Dinner was over before Mrs. Snawdor returned. She came into the kitchen
greatly ruffled as to hair and temper from having been caught by the
hook left hanging over the banisters by William J.

"Gimme the rocker!" she demanded. "My feet hurt so bad I'd just like to
unscrew 'em an' fling 'em in the dump heap."

"Where you been at?" asked Uncle Jed, who was cutting himself a slice of
bread from the loaf.

"I been down helpin' the new tenant move in on the first floor."

"Any childern?" asked Nance and Lobelia in one breath.

"No; just a foreign-lookin' old gentleman, puttin' on as much airs as if
he was movin' into the Walderastoria. Nobody knows his name or where he
comes from. Ike Lavinski says he plays the fiddle at the theayter. Talk
about your helpless people! I had to take a hand in gettin' his things
unloaded. He liked to never got done thankin' me."

Mr. Snawdor, who had been sitting in dejected silence before his
untouched food, pushed his plate back and sighed deeply.

"Now, fer heaven sake, Snawdor," began his wife in tones of exasperation,
"can't I do a kind act to a neighbor without a-rufflin' yer feathers the
wrong way?"

"I cleaned up yer room while you was gone," said Nance, eager to divert
the conversation from Mr. Snawdor. "Uncle Jed an' me carried the trash
down an' it filled the ash barrel clean up to the top."

"Well, I hope an' pray you didn't throw away my insurance book. I was
aimin' to clean up, myself, to-morrow. What on earth's the matter with
Rosy Velt?"

Rosy, who had been banished to the kitchen for misbehavior, had been
conducting a series of delicate experiments, with disastrous results. She
had been warned since infancy never to put a button up her nose, but
Providence having suddenly placed one in her way, and at the same time
engaged her mother's attention elsewhere, the opportunity was too
propitious to be lost.

Nance took advantage of her stepmother's sudden departure to cheer up
Mr. Snawdor.

"We're gittin' things cleaned up," she said, "I can't work no more to-day
though, 'cause I got to report to the lady."

"Ain't you goin' to slick yerself up a bit?" asked Uncle Jed, making a
futile effort to smooth her hair.

"I have," said Nance, indignantly, "Can't you see I got on a clean
apron?"

Uncle Jed's glance was not satisfied as it traveled from the dirty dress
below the apron to the torn stockings and shabby shoes.

"Why don't you wear the gold locket?" suggested Mrs. Snawdor, who now
returned with Rosy in one hand and the button in the other.

The gold locket was the one piece of jewelry in the family and when it
was suspended on a black ribbon around Nance's neck, it filled her with a
sense of elegance. So pleased was she with its effect that as she went
out that afternoon, she peeped in on the new tenant in the hope that he
would notice it. She found him leaning over a violin case, and her
interest was fired at once.

"Can you play on the fiddle?" she demanded.

The small, elderly man in the neat, black suit lifted his head and smiled
at her over his glasses.

"Yes, my little friend," he said in a low, refined voice, "I will play
for you to dance sometime. You would like that? Yes?"

Nance regarded him gravely.

"Say, are you a Polock or a Dago?" she asked.

He gave an amused shrug.

"I am neither. My name is Mr. Demorest. And you are my little
neighbor, perhaps?"

"Third floor on the right," said Nance, adding in a business-like tone,
"I'll be down to dance to-night."

She would have liked very much to stay longer, for the old gentleman was
quite unlike any one she had ever talked to before, but the card in her
hand named the hour of two, and back of the card was Mrs. Purdy, and
back of Mrs. Purdy the juvenile court, the one thing in life so far whose
authority Nance had seen fit to acknowledge.




CHAPTER VI

BUTTERNUT LANE


At the corner Dan Lewis stood aside like a deposed chieftain while his
companions knelt in an excited ring, engrossed in a game sanctioned by
custom and forbidden by law. Even to Nance's admiring eye he looked
dirtier and more ragged than usual, and his scowl deepened as she
approached.

"I ain't goin'," he said.

"Yes, you are, too. Why not?" said Nance, inconsequently.

"Aw, it ain't no use."

"Ain't you been to school?"

"Yep, but I ain't goin' to that lady's house. I ain't fit."

"You got to go to take me," said Nance, diplomatically. "I don't know
where Butternut Lane's at."

"You could find it, couldn't you?"

Nance didn't think she could. In fact she developed a sudden dependence
wholly out of keeping with her usual self-reliance.

This seemed to complicate matters for Dan. He stood irresolutely kicking
his bare heels against the curb and then reluctantly agreed to take her
as far as Mrs. Purdy's gate, provided nothing more was expected of him.

Their way led across the city to a suburb, and they were hot and tired
before half the distance was covered. But the expedition was fraught with
interest for Nance. After the first few squares of sullen silence, Dan
seemed to forget that she was merely a girl and treated her with the
royal equality usually reserved for boys. So confidential did they become
that she ventured to put a question to him that had been puzzling her
since the events of the morning.

"Say, Dan, when anybody kills hisself, is it murder?"

"It's kinder murder. You wouldn't ketch me doin' it as long as I could
get something to eat."

"You kin always git a piece of bread," said Nance.

"You bet you can't!" said Dan with conviction. "I ain't had nothin' to
eat myself since yisterday noon."

"Yer maw didn't come in last night?"

"I 'spec' she went on a visit somewhere," said Dan, whose lips
trembled slightly despite the stump of a cigarette that he manfully
held between them.

"Couldn't you git in a window?"

"Nope; the shutters was shut. Maybe I don't wisht it was December, an' I
was fourteen!"

"Sammy Smelts works an' he ain't no older'n me," said Nance. "You kin
git a fake certificate fer a quarter."

Dan smiled bitterly.

"Where'm I goin' to git the quarter? They won't let me sell things on the
street, or shoot craps, or work. Gee, I wisht I was rich as that Clarke
boy. Ike Lavinski says he buys a quarter's worth of candy at a time! He's
in Ike's room at school."

"He wasn't there yesterday," said Nance. "Uncle Jed seen him with another
boy, goin' out the railroad track."

"I know it. He played hookey. He wrote a excuse an' signed his maw's name
to it. Ike seen him do it. An' when the principal called up his maw this
mornin' an' ast her 'bout it, she up an' said she wrote it herself."

Nance was not sure whether she was called upon to admire the astuteness
of Mac or his mother, so she did not commit herself. But she was keenly
interested. Ever since that day in the juvenile court she had been
haunted by the memory of a trim, boyish figure arrayed in white, and by a
pair of large brown eyes which disdainfully refused to glance in her
direction.

"Say, Dan," she asked wistfully, "have you got a girl?"

"Naw," said Dan disdainfully, "what do I keer about girls?"

"I don't know. I thought maybe you had. I bet that there Clarke boy's
got two or three."

"Let him have 'em," said Dan; then, finding the subject distasteful, he
added, "what's the matter with hookin' on behind that there wagon?" And
suiting the action to the word, they both went in hot pursuit.

After a few jolting squares during which Nance courted death with her
flying skirts brushing the revolving wheels, the wagon turned into a side
street, and they were obliged to walk again.

"I wonder if this ain't the place?" she said, as they came in sight of a
low, white house half smothered in beech-trees, with a flower garden at
one side, at the end of which was a vine-covered summer-house.

"Here's where I beat it!" said Dan, but before he could make good his
intention, the stout little lady on the porch had spied them and came
hurrying down the walk, holding out both hands.

"Well, if here aren't my probationers!" she cried in a warm, comfortable
voice which seemed to suggest that probationers were what she liked best
in the world.

"Let me see, dear, your name is Mac?"

"No, ma'am, it's Dan," said that youth, trying to put out the lighted
cigarette stump which he had hastily thrust into his pocket.

"Ah! to be sure! And yours is--Mary?"

"No, ma'am, it's Nance."

"Why, of course!" cried the little lady, beaming at them, "I remember
perfectly."

She was scarcely taller than they were as she walked between them, with
an arm about the shoulder of each. She wore a gray dress and a wide white
collar pinned with a round blue pin that just matched her round blue
eyes. On each side of her face was a springy white curl that bobbed up
and down as she walked.

"Now," she said, with an expectant air, when they reached the house.
"Where shall we begin? Something to eat?"

Her question was directed to Dan, and he flushed hotly.

"No, ma'am," he said proudly.

"Yes, ma'am," said Nance, almost in the same breath.

"I vote 'Yes,' too; so the ayes have it," said Mrs. Purely gaily, leading
them through a neat hall into a neat kitchen, where they solemnly took
their seats.

"My visitors always help me with the lemonade," said the purring little
lady, giving Nance the lemons to roll, and Dan the ice to crack. Then as
she fluttered about, she began to ask them vague and seemingly futile
questions about home and school and play. Gradually their answers grew
from monosyllables into sentences, until, by the time the lemonade was
ready to serve, Nance was completely thawed out and Dan was getting soft
around the edges. Things were on the way to positive conviviality when
Mrs. Purdy suddenly turned to Nance and asked her where she went to
Sunday school.

Now Sunday school had no charms for Nance. On the one occasion when
curiosity had induced her to follow the stream of well-dressed children
into the side door of the cathedral, she had met with disillusion. It was
a place where little girls lifted white petticoats when they sat down and
straightened pink sashes when they got up, and put nickels in a basket.
Nance had had no lace petticoat or pink sash or nickel. She showed her
discomfort by misbehaving.

"Didn't you ever go back?" asked Mrs. Purdy.

"Nome. They didn't want me. I was bad, an' the teacher said Sunday school
was a place for good little girls."

"My! my!" said Mrs. Purdy, "this will never do. And how about you, Dan?
Do you go?"

"Sometimes I've went," said Dan. "I like it."

While this conversation was going on Nance could not keep her eyes from
the open door. There was more sky and grass out there than she had ever
seen at one time before. The one green spot with which she was familiar
was the neat plot of lawn on each side of the concrete walk leading into
the cathedral, and that had to be viewed through a chink in the fence
and was associated with the words, "Keep Out."

When all the lemonade was gone, and only one cookie left for politeness,
Mrs. Purdy took them into the sitting-room where a delicate-looking man
sat in a wheel-chair, carving something from a piece of wood. Nance's
quick eyes took in every detail of the bright, commonplace room; its gay,
flowered carpet and chintz curtains, its "fruit pieces" in wide, gold
frames, and its crocheted tidies presented a new ideal of elegance.

There was a music-box on the wall in which small figures moved about to a
tinkling melody; there were charm strings of bright colored buttons, and
a spinning-wheel, and a pair of bellows, all of which Mrs. Purdy
explained at length.

"Sister," said the man in the chair, feebly, "perhaps the children would
like to see my menagerie."

"Why, dearie, of course they would," said Mrs. Purdy, "Shall I wheel you
over to the cabinet?"

"I'll shove him," said Dan, making his first voluntary remark.

"There now!" said Mrs. Purdy, "see how much stronger he is than I am! And
he didn't jolt you a bit, did he, dearie?"

If the room itself was interesting, the cabinet was nothing short of
entrancing. It was full of carved animals in all manner of grotesque
positions. And the sick gentleman knew the name of each and kept saying
such funny things about them that Nance laughed hilariously, and Dan
forgot the prints of his muddy feet on the bright carpet, and even gave
up the effort to keep his hand over the ragged knee of his pants.

"He knows all about live animals, too," chirped Mrs. Purdy. "You'll have
to come some day and go over to the park with us and see his squirrels.
There's one he found with a broken leg, and he mended it as good as new."

The sun was slipping behind the trees before the children even thought of
going home.

"Next Friday at three!" said Mrs. Purdy, cheerily waving them good-by.
"And we are going to see who has the cleanest face and the best report."

"We sure had a good time," said Nance, as they hurried away through the
dusk. "But I'll git a lickin' all right when I git home."

"I liked that there animal man," said Dan slowly, "an' them cookies."

"Well, whatever made you lie to the lady 'bout bein' hungry?"

"I never lied. She ast me if I wanted her to give me somethin' to eat. I
thought she meant like a beggar. I wasn't goin' to take it that way, but
I never minded takin' it like--like--company."

Nance pondered the matter for a while silently; then she asked suddenly:

"Say, Dan, if folks are borned poor white trash, they don't have to go on
bein' it, do they?"




CHAPTER VII

AN EVICTION


The three chief diversions in Calvary Alley, aside from fights, were
funerals, arrests, and evictions. Funerals had the advantage of novelty,
for life departed less frequently than it arrived: arrests were in high
favor on account of their dramatic appeal, but the excitement, while
intense, was usually too brief to be satisfying; for sustained interest
the alley on the whole preferred evictions.

The week after Nance and Dan had reported to Mrs. Purdy, rumor traveled
from house to house and from room to room that the rent man was putting
the Lewises out. The piquant element in the situation lay in the absence
of the chief actor. "Mis' Lewis" herself had disappeared, and nobody knew
where she was or when she would return.

For many years the little cottage, sandwiched between Mr. Snawdor's "Bung
and Fawcett" shop and Slap Jack's saloon had been the scandal and, it
must be confessed the romance of the alley. It stood behind closed
shutters, enveloped in mystery, and no visitor ventured beyond its
threshold. The slender, veiled lady who flitted in and out at queer
hours, and whom rumor actually accused of sometimes arriving at the
corner in "a hack," was, despite ten years' residence, a complete
stranger to her neighbors. She was quiet and well-behaved; she wore good
clothes and shamefully neglected her child. These were the meager facts
upon which gossip built a tower of conjecture.

As for Dan, he was as familiar an object in the alley as the sparrows in
the gutter or the stray cats about the garbage cans. Ever since he could
persuade his small legs to go the way he wanted them to, he had pursued
his own course, asking nothing of anybody, fighting for his meager
rights, and becoming an adept in evading the questions that seemed to
constitute the entire conversation of the adult world. All that he asked
of life was the chance to make a living, and this the authorities sternly
forbade until he should reach that advanced age of fourteen which seemed
to recede as he approached. Like most of the boys in the gang, he had
been in business since he was six; but it was business that changed its
nature frequently and had to be transacted under great difficulty. He had
acquired proficiency as a crap-shooter only to find that the profession
was not regarded as an honorable one; he had invested heavily in pins and
pencils and tried to peddle them out on the avenue, only to find himself
sternly taken in hand by a determined lady who talked to him about minors
and street trades. Shoe-shining had been tried; so had selling papers,
but each of these required capital, and Dan's appetite was of such a
demanding character that the acquisition of capital was well nigh
impossible.

From that first day when the truant officer had driven him into the
educational fold, his problems had increased. It was not that he disliked
school. On the contrary he was ambitious and made heroic efforts to keep
up with the class; but it was up-hill work getting an education without
text-books. The city, to be sure, furnished these to boys whose mothers
applied for them in person, but Dan's mother never had time to come. The
cause of most of his trouble, however, was clothes; seatless trousers,
elbowless coats, brimless hats, constituted a series of daily
mortifications which were little short of torture.

Twice, through no fault of his own, he had stood alone before the bar of
justice, with no voice lifted in his behalf save the shrill, small voice
of Nance Molloy. Twice he had been acquitted and sent back to the old
hopeless environment, and admonished to try again. How hard he had tried
and against what odds, surely only the angel detailed to patrol Calvary
Alley has kept any record.

If any doubts assailed him concerning the mother who took little heed of
his existence, he never expressed them. Her name rarely passed his lips,
but he watched for her coming as a shipwrecked mariner watches for a
sail. When a boy ponders and worries over something for which he dares
not ask an explanation, he is apt to become sullen and preoccupied. On
the day that the long-suffering landlord served notice, Dan told no one
of his mother's absence. Behind closed doors he packed what things he
could, clumsily tying the rest of the household goods in the bedclothes.
At noon the new tenant arrived and, in order to get his own things in,
obligingly assisted in moving Dan's out. It was then and then only that
the news had gone abroad.

For three hours now the worldly possessions of the dubious Mrs. Lewis had
lain exposed on the pavement, and for three hours Dan had sat beside them
keeping guard. From every tenement window inquisitive eyes watched each
stage of the proceeding, and voluble tongues discussed every phase of the
situation. Every one who passed, from Mr. Lavinski, with a pile of pants
on his head, to little Rosy Snawdor, stopped to take a look at him and to
ask questions.

Dan had reached a point of sullen silence. Sitting on a pile of
bedclothes, with a gilt-framed mirror under one arm and a flowered water
pitcher under the other, he scowled defiance at each newcomer. Against
the jeers of the boys he could register vows of future vengeance and
console himself with the promise of bloody retribution; but against the
endless queries and insinuations of his adult neighbors, he was utterly
defenseless.

"Looks like she had ever'thing fer the parlor, an' nothin' fer the
kitchen," observed Mrs. Snawdor from her third-story window to Mrs.
Smelts at her window two floors below.

"I counted five pairs of curlin' irons with my own eyes," said
Mrs. Smelts, "an' as fer bottles! If they took out one, they took
out a hunderd."

"You don't reckon that there little alcohol stove was all she had to cook
on, do you?" called up Mrs. Gorman from the pavement below.

"Maybe that's what she het her curlin' irons on!" was Mrs. Snawdor's
suggestion, a remark which provoked more mirth than it deserved.

Dan gazed straight ahead with no sign that he heard. However strong the
temptation was to dart away into some friendly hiding place, he was
evidently not going to yield to it. The family possessions were in
jeopardy, and he was not one to shirk responsibilities.

Advice was as current as criticism. Mrs. Gorman, being a chronic
recipient of civic favors, advocated an appeal to the charity
organization; Mrs. Snawdor, ever at war with foreign interference,
strongly opposed the suggestion, while Mrs. Smelts with a covetous eye on
the gilt mirror under Dan's arm, urged a sidewalk sale. As for the boy
himself, not a woman in the alley but was ready to take him in and share
whatever the family larder provided.

But to all suggestions Dan doggedly shook his head. He was "thinkin' it
out," he said, and all he wanted was to be let alone.

"Well, you can't set there all night," said Mrs. Snawdor, "if yer maw
don't turn up by five o'clock, us neighbors is goin' to take a hand."

All afternoon Dan sat watching the corner round which his mother might
still appear. Not a figure had turned into the alley, that he had not
seen it, not a clanging car had stopped in the street beyond, that his
quick ear had not noted.

About the time the small hand of the cathedral clock got around to four,
Nance Molloy came skipping home from school. She had been kept in for a
too spirited resentment of an older girl's casual observation that both
of her shoes were for the same foot. To her, as to Dan, these trying
conventions in the matter of foot-gear were intolerable. No combination
seemed to meet the fastidious demands of that exacting sixth grade.

"Hello, Dan!" she said, coming to a halt at sight of the obstructed
pavement. "What's all this for?"

"Put out," said Dan laconically.

"Didn't yer maw never come back?"

"Nope."

Nance climbed up beside him on the bedclothes and took her seat.

"What you goin' to do?" she asked in a business-like tone.

"Dunno." Dan did not turn his head to look at her, but he felt a dumb
comfort in her presence. It was as if her position there beside him on
the pillory made his humiliation less acute. He shifted the water
pitcher, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder:

"They all want to divide the things an' take keer of 'em 'til she comes,"
he said, "but I ain't goin' to let 'em."

"I wouldn't neither," agreed Nance. "Old man Smelts an' Mr. Gorman'd have
what they took in hock before mornin'. There's a coal shed over to Slap
Jack's ain't full. Why can't you put yer things in there for to-night?"

"He wouldn't let me. He's a mean old Dutchman."

"He ain't, neither! He's the nicest man in the alley, next to Uncle Jed
an' that there old man with the fiddle. Mr. Jack an' me's friends. He
gives me pretzels all the time. I'll go ast him."

A faint hope stirred in Dan as she slid down from her perch and darted
into the saloon next door. She had wasted no time in conjecture or
sympathy; she had plunged at once into action. When she returned, the fat
saloonkeeper lumbered in her wake:

"Dose tings is too many, already," he protested. "I got no place to put
my coal once de cold vedder comes."

"It ain't come yet," said Nance. "Besides his mother'll be here
to-morrow, I 'spect."

"Mebbe she vill, und mebbe she von't," said the saloonkeeper astutely. "I
don't want dat I should mess up myself mid dis here piziness."

"The things ain't goin' to hurt your old coal shed none!" began Nance,
firing up; then with a sudden change of tactics, she slipped her hand
into Mr. Jack's fat, red one, and lifted a pair of coaxing blue eyes.
"Say, go on an' let him, Mr. Jack! I told him you would. I said you was
one of the nicest men in the alley. You ain't goin' to make me out a
liar, are you?"

"Vell, I leave him put 'em in for to-night," said the saloonkeeper
grudgingly, his Teuton caution overcome by Celtic wile.

The conclave of women assembled in the hall of Number One, to carry out
Mrs. Snawdor's threat of "taking a hand," were surprised a few minutes
later, to see the objects under discussion being passed over the fence by
Mr. Jack and Dan under the able generalship of the one feminine member of
the alley whose counsel had been heeded.

When the last article had been transferred to the shed, and a veteran
padlock had been induced to return to active service, the windows of the
tenement were beginning to glow dully, and the smell of cabbage and
onions spoke loudly of supper.

Nance, notwithstanding the fourth peremptory summons from aloft, to walk
herself straight home that very minute, still lingered with Dan.

"Come on home with me," she said. "You can sleep in Uncle Jed's bed 'til
five o'clock."

"I kin take keer of myself all right," he said. "It was the things that
pestered me."

"But where you goin' to git yer supper?"

"I got money," he answered, making sure that his nickel was still in his
pocket. "Besides, my mother might come while I was there."

"Well, don't you fergit that to-morrow we go to Mis' Purdy's."

Dan looked at her with heavy eyes.

"Oh! I ain't got time to fool around with that business. I don't know
where I'll be at by to-morrow."

"You'll be right here," said Nance firmly, "and I ain't goin' to budge a
step without you if I have to wait all afternoon."

"Well, I ain't comin'," said Dan.

"I'm goin' to wait," said Nance, "an' if I git took up fer not reportin',
it'll be your fault."

Dan slouched up to the corner and sat on the curbstone where he could
watch the street cars. As they stopped at the crossing, he leaned forward
eagerly and scanned the passengers who descended. In and out of the
swinging door of the saloon behind him passed men, singly and in groups.
There were children, too, with buckets, but they had to go around to the
side. He wanted to go in himself and buy a sandwich, but he didn't dare.
The very car he was waiting for might come in his absence.

At nine o'clock he was still waiting when two men came out and paused
near him to light their cigars. They were talking about Skeeter Newson,
the notorious pickpocket, who two days before had broken jail and had
not yet been found. Skeeter's exploits were a favorite topic of the
Calvary Micks, and Dan, despite the low state of his mind, pricked his
ears to listen.

"They traced him as far as Chicago," said one of the men, "but there he
give 'em the slip."

"Think of the nerve of him taking that Lewis woman with him," said the
other voice. "By the way, I hear she lives around here somewhere."

"A bad lot," said the first voice as they moved away.

Dan sat rigid with his back to the telegraph pole, his feet in the
gutter, his mouth fallen open, staring dully ahead of him. Then suddenly
he reached blindly for a rock, and staggered to his feet, but the figures
had disappeared in the darkness. He sat down again, while his breath came
in short, hard gasps. It was a lie! His mother was not bad! He knew she
was good. He wanted to shriek it to the world. But even as he
passionately defended her to himself, fears assailed him.

Why had they always lived so differently from other people? Why was he
never allowed to ask questions or to answer them or to know where his
mother went or how they got their living? What were the parcels she
always kept locked up in the trunk in the closet? Events, little heeded
at the time of occurrence, began to fall into place, making a hideous and
convincing pattern. Dim memories of men stole out of the past and threw
distorted shadows on his troubled brain. There was Bob who had once given
him a quarter, and Uncle Dick who always came after he was in bed, and
Newt--his neck stiffened suddenly. Newt, whom his mother used always to
be talking about, and whose name he had not heard now for so long that he
had almost forgotten it. Skeeter Newson--Newt--"The Lewis Woman." He saw
it all in a blinding flash, and in that awful moment of realization he
passed out of his childhood and entered man's estate.

Choking back his sobs, he fled from the scene of his disgrace. In one
alley and out another he stumbled, looking for a hole in which he could
crawl and pour out his pent-up grief. But privacy is a luxury reserved
for the rich, and Dan and his kind cannot even claim a place in which to
break their hearts.

It was not until he reached the river bank and discovered an overturned
hogshead that he found a refuge. Crawling in, he buried his face in his
arms and wept, not with the tempestuous abandonment of a lonely child,
but with the dry, soul-racking sobs of a disillusioned man. His mother
had been the one beautiful thing in his life, and he had worshiped her as
some being from another world. Other boys' mothers had coarse, red hands
and loud voices; his had soft, white hands and a sweet, gentle voice that
never scolded.

Sometimes when she stayed at home, they had no money, and then she would
lie on the bed and cry, and he would try to comfort her. Those were the
times when he would stay away from school and go forth to sell things at
the pawn shop. The happiest nights he could remember were the ones when
he had come home with money in his pocket, to a lighted lamp in the
window, and a fire on the hearth and his mother's smile of welcome. But
those times were few and far between; he was much more used to darkened
windows, a cold hearth, and an almost empty larder. In explanation of
these things he had accepted unconditionally his mother's statement that
she was a lady.

As he fought his battle alone there in the dark, all sorts of wild plans
came to him. Across the dark river the shore lights gleamed, and down
below at the wharf, a steamboat was making ready to depart. He had heard
of boys who slipped aboard ships and beat their way to distant cities. A
fierce desire seized him to get away, anywhere, just so he would not have
to face the shame and disgrace that had come upon him. There was no one
to care now where he went or what became of him. He would run away and be
a tramp where nobody could ask questions.

With quick decision he started up to put his plan into action when a
disturbing thought crossed his mind. Had Nance Molloy meant it when she
said she wouldn't report to the probation officer if he didn't go with
her? Would she stand there in the alley and wait for him all afternoon,
just as he had waited so often for some one who did not come? His
reflections were disturbed by a hooting noise up the bank, followed by a
shower of rocks. The next instant a mongrel pup scurried down the levee
and dropped shivering at his feet.

The yells of the pursuers died away as Dan gathered the whimpering beast
into his arms and examined its injuries.

"Hold still, old fellow. I ain't goin' to hurt you," he whispered,
tenderly wiping the blood from one dripping paw. "I won't let 'em git
you. I'll take care of you."

The dog lifted a pair of agonized eyes to Dan's face and licked
his hands.

"You lemme tie it up with a piece of my sleeve, an' I'll give you
somethin' to eat," went on Dan. "Me an' you'll buy a sandich an' I'll eat
the bread an' you can have the meat. Me an you'll be partners."

Misery had found company, and already life seemed a little less desolate.
But the new-comer continued to yelp with pain, and Dan examined the limp
leg dubiously.

"I b'lieve it's broke," he thought. Then he had an inspiration.

"I know what I'll do," he said aloud, "I'll carry you out to the animal
man when me an' Nance go to report to-morrow."




CHAPTER VIII

AMBITION STIRS


After Nance Molloy's first visit to Butternut Lane, life became a series
of thrilling discoveries. Hitherto she had been treated collectively. At
home she was "one of the Snawdor kids"; to the juvenile world beyond the
corner she was "a Calvary Alley mick"; at school she was "a pupil of the
sixth grade." It remained for little Mrs. Purdy to reveal the fact to her
that she was an individual person.

Mrs. Purdy had the most beautiful illusions about everything. She seemed
to see her fellow-men not as they were, but as God intended them to be.
She discovered so many latent virtues and attractions in her new
probationers that they scarcely knew themselves.

When, for instance, she made the startling observation that Nance had
wonderful hair, and that, if she washed it with an egg and brushed it
every day, it would shine like gold, Nance was interested, but
incredulous. Until now hair had meant a useless mass of tangles that at
long intervals was subjected to an agonizing process of rebraiding. The
main thing about hair was that it must never on any account be left
hanging down one's back. Feuds had been started and battles lost by
swinging braids. The idea of washing it was an entirely new one to her;
but the vision of golden locks spurred her on to try the experiment. She
carefully followed directions, but the egg had been borrowed from Mrs.
Smelts who had borrowed it some days before from Mrs. Lavinski, and the
result was not what Mrs. Purdy predicted.

"If ever I ketch you up to sech fool tricks again," scolded Mrs. Snawdor,
who had been called to the rescue, "I'll skin yer hide off! You've no
need to take yer hair down except when I tell you. You kin smooth it up
jus' like you always done."

Having thus failed in her efforts at personal adornment, Nance turned her
attention to beautifying her surroundings. The many new features observed
in the homely, commonplace house in Butternut Lane stirred her ambition.
Her own room, to be sure, possessed architectural defects that would have
discouraged most interior decorators. It was small and dark, with only
one narrow opening into an air-shaft. Where the plaster had fallen off,
bare laths were exposed, and in rainy weather a tin tub occupied the
center of the floor to catch the drippings from a hole in the roof. For
the rest, a slat bed, an iron wash-stand, and a three-legged chair
comprised the furniture.

But Nance was not in the least daunted by the prospect. With
considerable ingenuity she evolved a dresser from a soap box and the
colored supplements of the Sunday papers, which she gathered into a
valance, in imitation of Mrs. Purdy's bright chintz. In the air-shaft
window she started three potato vines in bottles, but not satisfied with
the feeble results, she pinned red paper roses to the sickly white stems.
The nearest substitutes she could find for pictures were labels off
tomato cans, and these she tacked up with satisfaction, remembering Mrs.
Purdy's admired fruit pictures.

"'Tain't half so dark in here as 'tis down in Smeltses," she bragged to
Fidy, who viewed her efforts with pessimism. "Once last summer the sun
come in here fer purty near a week. It shined down the shaft. You ast
Lobelia if it didn't."

Nance was nailing a pin into the wall with the heel of her slipper, and
the loose plaster was dropping behind the bed.

"Mis' Purdy says if I don't say no cuss words, an' wash meself all
over on Wednesdays and Sat'days, she's goin' to help me make myself a
new dress!"

"Why don't she give you one done made?" asked Fidy.

"She ain't no charity lady!" said Nance indignantly. "Me an' her's
friends. She said we was."

"What's she goin' to give Dan?" asked Fidy, to whom personages from the
upper world were interesting only when they bore gifts in their hands.

"She ain't givin' him nothin', Silly! She's lettin' him help her. He gits
a quarter a hour, an' his dinner fer wheelin' Mr. Walter in the park."

"They say Mr. Jack's give him a room over the saloon 'til his maw
comes back."

"I reckon I know it. I made him! You jus' wait 'til December when
Dan'll be fourteen. Once he gits to work he won't have to take nothin'
offen nobody!"

School as well as home took on a new interest under Mrs. Purdy's
influence. Shoes and textbooks appeared almost miraculously, and reports
assumed a new and exciting significance. Under this new arrangement Dan
blossomed into a model of righteousness, but Nance's lapses from grace
were still frequent. The occasional glimpses she was getting of a code of
manners and morals so different from those employed by her stepmother,
were not of themselves sufficient to reclaim her. On the whole she found
being good rather stupid and only consented to conform to rules when she
saw for herself the benefit to be gained.

For instance, when she achieved a burning desire to be on the honor roll
and failed on account of being kept at home, she took the matter into her
own small hands and reported herself to the once despised truant
officer. The result was a stormy interview between him and her stepmother
which removed all further cause of jealousy on the part of Mr. Snawdor,
and gave Nance a record for perfect attendance.

Having attained this distinction, she was fired to further effort. She
could soon glibly say the multiplication tables backward, repeat all the
verses in her school reader, and give the names and length of the most
important rivers in the world. On two occasions she even stepped into
prominence. The first was when she electrified a visiting trustee by her
intimate knowledge of the archipelagos of the eastern hemisphere. The
fact that she had not the remotest idea of the nature of an archipelago
was mercifully not divulged. The second had been less successful. It was
during a visit of Bishop Bland's to the school. He was making a personal
investigation concerning a report, then current, that public school
children were underfed. Bishop Bland was not fond of children, but he was
sensitive to any slight put upon the stomach, and he wished very much to
be able to refute the disturbing rumor.

"Now I cannot believe," he said to the sixth grade, clasping his plump
hands over the visible result of many good dinners, "that any one of you
nice boys and girls came here this morning hungry. I want any boy in the
room who is not properly nourished at home to stand up."

Nobody rose, and the bishop cast an affirmative smile on the principal.

"As I thought," he continued complacently. "Now I'm going to ask any
little girl in this room to stand up and tell us just exactly what she
had for breakfast. I shall not be in the least surprised if it was just
about what I had myself."

There was a silence, and it began to look as if nobody was going to call
the bishop's bluff, when Nance jumped up from a rear seat and said at the
top of her voice:

"A pretzel and a dill pickle!"

The new-found enthusiasm for school might have been of longer duration
had it not been for a counter-attraction at home. From that first night
when old "Mr. Demry," as he had come to be called, had played for her to
dance, Nance had camped on his door-step. Whenever the scrape of his
fiddle was heard from below, she dropped whatever she held, whether it
was a hot iron or the baby, and never stopped until she reached the
ground floor. And by and by other children found their way to him, not
only the children of the tenement, but of the whole neighborhood as well.
It was soon noised abroad that he knew how to coax the fairies out of the
woods and actually into the shadows of Calvary Alley where they had never
been heard of before. With one or two children on his knees and a circle
on the floor around him, he would weave a world of dream and rainbows,
and people it with all the dear invisible deities of childhood. And while
he talked, his thin cheeks would flush, and his dim eyes shine with the
same round wonder as his listeners.

But some nights when the children came, they found him too sleepy to tell
stories or play on the fiddle. At such times he always emptied his
pockets of small coins and sent the youngsters scampering away to find
the pop-corn man. Then he would stand unsteadily at the door and watch
them go, with a wistful, disappointed look on his tired old face.

Nance overheard her elders whispering that "he took something," and she
greatly feared that he would meet a fate similar to that of Joe Smelts.
In Joe's case it was an overcoat, and he had been forced to accept the
hospitality of the State for thirty days. Nance's mind was greatly
relieved to find that it was only powders that Mr. Demry took--powders
that made him walk queer and talk queer and forget sometimes where he
lived. Then it was that the children accepted him as their special
charge. They would go to his rescue wherever they found him and guide his
wandering footsteps into the haven of Calvary Alley.

"He's a has-benn," Mrs. Snawdor declared to Uncle Jed. "You an' me are
never-wases, but that old gent has seen better days. They tell me that
settin' down in the orchestry, he looks fine. That's the reason his
coat's always so much better'n his shoes an' pants; he dresses up the
part of him that shows. You can tell by the way he acts an' talks that
he's different from us."

Perhaps that was the reason, that while Nance loved Uncle Jed quite as
much, she found Mr. Demry far more interesting. Everything about him was
different, from his ideas concerning the proper behavior of boys and
girls, to his few neatly distributed belongings. His two possessions that
most excited her curiosity and admiration, were the violin and its
handsome old rosewood case, which you were not allowed to touch, and a
miniature in a frame of gold, of a beautiful pink and white girl in a
pink and white dress, with a fair curl falling over her bare shoulder.
Nance would stand before the latter in adoring silence; then she would
invariably say:

"Go on an' tell me about her, Mr. Demry!"

And standing behind her, with his fine sensitive hands on her shoulders,
Mr. Demry would tell wonderful stories of the little girl who had once
been his. And as he talked, the delicate profile in the picture became an
enchanting reality to Nance, stirring her imagination and furnishing an
object for her secret dreams.

Hitherto Birdie Smelts had been her chief admiration. Birdie was fourteen
and wore French heels and a pompadour and had beaux. She had worked in
the ten-cent store until her misplaced generosity with the glass beads
on her counter resulted in her being sent to a reformatory. But Birdie's
bold attractions suffered in comparison with the elusive charm of the
pink and white goddess with the golden curl.

This change marked the dawn of romance in Nance's soul. Up to this time
she had demanded of Mr. Demry the most "scareful" stories he knew, but
from now on Blue Beard and Jack, the Giant-Killer had to make way for
Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty. She went about with her head full of
dreams, and eyes that looked into an invisible world. It was not that the
juvenile politics of the alley were less interesting, or the street
fights or adventures of the gang less thrilling. It was simply that life
had become absorbingly full of other things.

As the months passed Mrs. Snawdor spent less and less time at home. She
seemed to think that when she gave her nights on her knees for her
family, she was entitled to use the remaining waking hours for
recreation. This took the form of untiring attention to other people's
business. She canvassed the alley for delinquent husbands to admonish,
for weddings to arrange, for funerals to supervise--the last being a
specialty, owing to experience under the late Mr. Yager.

Upon one of the occasions when she was superintending the entrance of a
neighboring baby into the world, her own made a hurried exit. A banana
and a stick of licorice proved too stimulating a diet for him, and he
closed his eyes permanently on a world that had offered few attractions.

It was Nance who, having mothered him from his birth, worked with him
through the long night of agony; and who, when the end came, cut the
faded cotton flowers from her hat to put in the tiny claw-like hand that
had never touched a real blossom; and it was Nance's heart that broke
when they took him away.

It is doubtful whether any abstract moral appeal could have awakened her
as did the going out of that little futile life. It stirred her deepest
sympathies and affections, and connected her for the first time with the
forces that make for moral and social progress.

"He wouldn't a-went if we'd treated him right!" she complained
bitterly to Mr. Snawdor a week later. "He never had no sunshine, nor
fresh air, nor nothin'. You can't expect a baby to live where a
sweet-potato vine can't!"

"He's better off than me," said Mr. Snawdor, "what with the funeral, an'
the coal out, an' the rent due, I'm at the end of my rope. I told her it
was comin'. But she would have a white coffin an' six hacks. They'll have
to set us out in the street fer all I can see!"

Nance looked at him apprehensively.

"Well, we better be doin' something'," she said. "Can't Uncle Jed help
us?"

"I ain't goin' to let him. He's paid my rent fer the last time."

This unexpected flare of independence in Mr. Snawdor was disturbing. The
Snawdor family without Uncle Jed was like a row of stitches from which
the knitting needle has been withdrawn.

"If I was two years older, I could go to work," said Nance, thinking of
Dan, who was now on the pay-roll of Clarke's Bottle Factory.

"It ain't right to make you stop school," said Mr. Snawdor. "It ain't
bein' fair to you."

"I'd do it all right," said Nance, fired by his magnanimity, "only
they're on to me now I've reported myself. Ain't you makin' any money at
the shop?"

Mr. Snawdor shook his head.

"I might if I was willin' to buy junk. But you know where them boys gets
their stuff."

Nance nodded wisely.

"The gang bust into a empty house last night an' c