The crouching blue-black one shrank back into the stairway, and was seen no more. The street returned to utter emptiness. There remained only the lifeless body of Eat-'Em-Up-jack. Nothing beyond, save the softly falling veil of snow, with the street lamps shining through.
II.—THE BABY'S FINGERS
It was a Central Office man who told me how the baby lost its fingers. I like Central Office men; they live romances and have adventures. The man I most shrink from is your dull, proper individual to whom nothing happens. You have seen a hundred such. Rigidly correct, they go uneventfully to and fro upon their little respectable tracks. Evenings, from the safe yet severe vantage of their little respectable porches, they pass judgment upon humanity from across the front fence. After which, they go inside and weary their wives with their tasteless, pale society, while those melancholy matrons question themselves, in a spirit of tacit despair, concerning the blessings of matrimony. In the end, first thanking heaven that they are not as other men, they retire to bed, to rise in the dawning and repeat the history of every pulseless yesterday of their existence. Nothing ever overtakes them that doesn't overtake a clam. They are interesting, can be interesting, to no one save themselves. To talk with one an hour is like being lost in the desert an hour. I prefer people into whose lives intrudes some element of adventure, and who, as they roll out of their blankets in the morning, cannot give you, word and minute, just what they will be saying and doing every hour in the coming twelve.
My Central Office friend, in telling of the baby's absent fingers, began by speaking of Johnny Spanish. Spanish has been sent to prison for no less than seven years. Dribben and Blum arrested him, and when the next morning he was paraded at the Central Office looking-over, the speech made upon him by Commissioner Flynn set a resentful pulse to beating in his swarthy cheek.
Not that Spanish had been arrested for the baby's lost fingers. That story in the telling came later, although the wrong it registered had happened months before. Dribben and Blum picked him up—as a piece of work it did them credit—for what occurred in Mersher Miller's place.
As all the world knows, Mersher Miller, or as he is called among his intimates, Mersher the Strong-Arm, conducts a beer house at 171 Norfolk Street. It was a placid April evening, and Mersher's brother, as bottle-tosser, was busy behind the bar. Mersher himself was not in, which—for Mersher—may or may not have been greatly to the good.
Spanish came into the place. His hat was low-drawn over his black eyes. Mersher's brother, wiping glasses, didn't know him.
“Where's Mersher?” asked Spanish.