“I don't want it.”
“Come off! You can't help it.”
Carroll flitted away in the direction of The Press building.
Before seven o'clock the sparrows in the dark maples were forgetting in sleep all the great issues of their day.
Hennion left his rooms, in the apartment building that was splendidly called “The Versailles,” and came out in the street. It was too early to see Camilla. He walked a few blocks north, and turned down Maple Street presently, past St. Catherine's Church, and Freiburger's saloon across the street from the church. They were the seats of the two rulers of the Fourth Ward, church and state—Father Harra and Frei-burger.
Maple Street instead of tumbling down the bluff like other streets, to be chopped off short at the wharves, seems to lift itself there with a sense of power beneath, becomes a victory and a spirit, and so floats out over the brown Muscadine. The bridge was always to Hennion more like his father than the canal or the C. V. Railroad. The railroad was a financial cripple now, absorbed in a system. The great day of the canal was long past. The elder Hennion had seemed a soul for daring and success, and that was the bridge. It stood to Hennion for a memorial, and for the symbol of his father's life and his own hope in the working world. He liked to stand on it, to feel it beneath and around him, knowing what each steel girder meant, and what in figures was the strength of its grip and pull. There was no emotional human nature in it, no need of compromise. Steel was steel, and stone stone, and not a bolt or strand of wire had any prejudice or private folly. In a certain way he seemed to find his father there, and to be able to go over with him their old vivid talks.
The Muscadine reflected up at him, out of its brown turbulence, shattered fragments of the moon and stars. A quavering voice spoke in his ear: “Got a light?”
Besides himself and the inebriate, who held up by the nearest girder, there was only one other person on the bridge, a small, thin figure, creeping from the distance toward them in the moonlight, a half-grown child, who leaned her shoulders to one side to balance a basket on the other.
“Pretty full, Jimmy Shays,” Hennion said, giving him a match. “You'd float all right if you fell into the river.”
“Tha'sh right, tha'sh right! I drinks to pervent accerdents, myself.”