ONE WAY—AND ANOTHER
By Noble May
“That’s where my finish will be,” said the girl. She rested her odd-looking bundle on the railing of the bridge and looked moodily down into the river.
Tough Muggins wasn’t particularly strong on the conventionalities, but he had stopped on the bridge to look at the river coquetting under the moon’s rays, not to listen to idle talk from strange girls. It listened like a touch, too, so he slid an indifferent eye around in the girl’s direction and advised her to chop it. Something, however, about the tense look of her as she gazed fiercely down into the rippling water compelled him, in spite of his natural inclination, to carry the matter slightly farther.
“What’s got you sore on the livin’ proposition?” he asked grudgingly.
If he had expected melodrama he was doomed to disappointment.
“Same old trouble,” she said quietly. “I was workin’ for some swell folks up on the North Side—real swells they was, believe me. They thought I was bad. Maybe I am. I don’t know. He promised. What more could a girl expect? When they found out, the lady she says to me, ‘Of course, I can’t keep you here, Molly. It wouldn’t be right with me with two daughters of my own, but I’m awful sorry, and I hope it’ll be a lesson to you. There’s plenty of chances for you to start again. It ain’t never too late to turn over a new leaf. Don’t tumble down them stairs,’ she says when I kind of stumbled. Like it would make any difference! Then she shut the door on me. ‘There’s plenty of chances for you to begin over again.’ That’s what she said. Lord, ain’t it funny?” cried the girl. Her laugh rang out high and shrill, seeming to cut into the clear darkness.
Tough agreed that it was funny. Having, perhaps, less sense of humour than Molly, he qualified the statement by adding that it was kind of tough also.
“How about the fella?” he asked casually.
“Ditched me,” replied the girl. “After I come out the horspittle I never seen hide nor hair of him. Gee,” she concluded bitterly, “I was crazy about that lad.”
“Must ’a’ been a kind of a mean skunk, though,” judged Tough. “How about the kid?”
The girl’s eyes sought the glittering river. “I give it away,” she told him finally.
“Oh!” ejaculated Tough.
The girl seemed to feel a tentative rebuke in this. “What could I do?” she asked. “I tried to get another job before—and I couldn’t. I don’t know’s I’ll try again. There’s easier ways”—the sentence hung suspended for a moment—“you know.”
There was no polite veil of assumed ignorance thrown over such situations in the circle in which Tough moved. He knew, of course. Still——
“There’s better ways,” he ventured.
Tough was startled at the flash of anger that lit up the girl’s shrunken face. For a moment she looked as if she would strike him. Then, with a sharp, quick movement, she buried her face in the covering of the bundle which she had been holding lightly on the railing of the bridge. The next instant Tough heard a soft splash as something struck the water.
“There’s that way,” a voice shrieked in his ear.
Tough sprang to the railing and looked down.
“Gawd a’mighty, girl!” he panted.
“I seen—seen—Gawd, woman!” he moistened his dry lips. “Was it—say, it wasn’t the kid?”
Molly burst into a blood-curdling laugh.
“Sure it was,” she cried. “I doped it a-purpose. I been trying to get up the nerve to do it ever since this morning. Do you think I was going to let her grow up into a thing like her mother? Man, you’re crazy.”
Tough’s coat had been already flung off. “Don’t be a quitter, girl,” he gasped. “Run for the cop and tell him to put out a boat, and then you wait for me. We’ll save her and she’ll be an all-right one and like her mother, too.”
Just how near Tough came to seeing his finish there in the rays of the moon which he loved nobody but Tough ever knew. It was easy enough to swim with the current and overtake and seize the tiny bundle held up for the moment on the surface of the water by the expanding draperies. It was when he turned and tried to swim back to the bridge that the waves pushed and beat at him like cruel hands. He thought somebody was trying to strangle him. What were they hanging to his feet for? Why did they push him and strike him? He wouldn’t go that way. He had to go the other way. He must make them quit twisting him. And then through the awful pounding at his brain came a cheery voice: “Ketch a hold, bo. Ketch a hold.”
Sputtering, gasping, sick, exhausted, Tough hitched his elbows weakly over the side and let the unconscious thing he had so nearly lost his life for slip gently into the bottom of the boat.
“Why, it’s Tough Muggins,” said the officer, looking down into his face. “For the lova Mike, what was you doin’?”
Through the dank drip of his hair Tough winked.
“I just dropped in to get a drink,” he said. “I belong to the cop family and I got the habit.”
It was not until the boat had ground itself gratingly up against the rough stone ledge that served for a landing that Tough openly acknowledged Policeman Connelley’s right to an explanation of a sort. He jerked his head toward Molly, who stood, wild-eyed and trembling, on the narrow ledge above.
“My girl,” he said succinctly. “We was scrappin’, and she pitched my bundle of clothes that I was fetchin’ home overboard. There was money in the pants,” he added by way of gracious explanation. “That was why I jumped in after ’em.”
“Didn’t know you had a girl, Tough.” Big Jim Connelley may have had his suspicions, but his tone was of the most conventional.
“That so?” inquired Tough as he scrambled up the ledge. “Say, Jim, the things you don’t know would fill a city directory right up to the limit.”
Then he turned to Molly. “Guess you’re cooled off, now, old girl, what?” he said. “Come on, then. Let’s beat it home.”
Gathering her unconscious baby to her with trembling, passionate hands, the girl went with him trustingly.