“Mebbe the wind blew it off,” he tried to tell himself, but something inside him rejected the explanation and he felt an icy finger drawn up and down his spine. Again he plunged his head into the capacious can and succeeded in reviving his heart action.
More minutes of dreadful suspense passed. A leaden silence had filled the sweltering room. Even the voices of the tenements had died away to a funereal murmur. Battle as he did with all his will, Phelan’s eyes were again drawn from their fixed gaze upon the wall, and what he saw this time induced a strangling sensation.
Three toes had distinctly wiggled.
He withdrew his eyes on the instant and his shaking hand reached down for the can. His fingers had barely touched it when an awful shriek rent the air. The shriek came from the bed, and it was followed by a second yell and then by a third.
Michael Phelan did not open the door as he passed out. It was not a very strong door and it went down like cardboard before the impact. The third shriek awoke the echoes just as Officer 666 was coasting 42 down the stairs on the seat of his departmental trousers. His departmental coat and his departmental hat were in no way connected with his precipitate transit. A raging Polish woman brought these details of Michael’s uniform to the Eldridge street station a little later. Likewise she prefered charges against Phelan that come under the heading of “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.”
It was a tremendous trial, in the course of which the Deputy Police Commissioner who sat in judgment barely missed having a serious stroke. It was adduced in evidence that Officer 666 had entered the wrong flat, the Coroner’s case being one flight up.
But while the whole town rocked with laughter Michael Phelan failed to see the joke, and his hatred of Precinct Detective Tim Feeney never cooled. That he got off with a light sentence of one day’s fine did not in the least improve his humor. He knew he was a marked man from that day, and it was all his mother could do to urge him to stay on the force.
In the course of time, however, the sting had worn off and the young patrolman learned to smile again. His hollow cheeks had filled out amazingly during the period of the brewery beat and on that late autumn day when he stepped into the pages of this narrative he looked mighty good, not only to the raven-haired Rosalind O’Neill but to a host of other pretty nursemaids who were wheeling their aristocratic little charges up and down The Avenue.
Nor was Michael Phelan at all unconscious of this as he sauntered along the broad pavement and gracefully twirled his baton. His chest jutted out like the breast of a pouter pigeon and he wore the solemnly self-conscious expression of a peacock on parade.