And all that day Teddy lay crouched in his lair with his eye glued more or less faithfully to the peephole. Except from hunger, he had suffered but little, and the minutes had been too exciting to seem long in going by. It was negative excitement, springing from what didn't happen; but because something might happen, and happen at any instant, it was excitement. From morning to midday, and from midday on into the afternoon, cars, carts, and pedestrians traveled in and out of Jersey City, each spelling possible danger. Now and then a man or a vehicle had paused in the road within calling distance of the shanty. For two minutes, for five, or for ten at a time, Teddy lay there wondering as to their intentions and trying to make up his mind as to his own course. Whether to shoot himself or make a bolt for it, or if he shot himself whether it should be through the temple or the heart, were points as to which he was still undecided. He would get inspiration, he told himself, when the time came. He had often heard that in crises of peril the brain worked quicker than in moments of tranquillity; and perhaps, after all, a crisis of peril might not lie before him.
In a measure, he was growing used to his situation as an outlaw; he was growing used to the separation from the family. It was not that he loved them less, but that he had moved on and left them behind. He could think of them now without the longing to cry he had felt yesterday, while the desperation of his plight centered his thought more and more upon himself. If he didn't have to shoot himself, he planned, in as far as plans were possible, to sneak away into the unknown and become a tramp. He couldn't do it yet, because the roads were probably being watched for him; but by and by, when the hunt had become less keen....
Seven doughnuts swallowed without a drop of water being far from the nourishment to which he was accustomed, he waited with painful eagerness for nightfall. When the primrose-colored lights up and down the road and along the ragged fringe of the town were deepening to orange, he crept forth cautiously. Even while half hidden by the sedgy grasses, he felt horribly exposed, and when he emerged into the open highway, the eyes of all the police in New York seemed to spy him through the twilight. Nevertheless, he tramped back toward the dwellings of men, doing his best to hide his face when motor lights flashed over him too vividly.
Unable to think of anything better than to return to the friendly woman who had given him seven doughnuts for his six, he found her behind her counter, in company with a wispy little girl.
"Ah, good-evening. Zo you'f come ba-ack. You fount my zandwiches naice."
Teddy replied that he had, ordering six, with a dozen of her doughnuts. Her manner was so affable that he failed to notice her piercing eyes fixed upon him, nor did he realize how much a young man's aspect can betray after twenty-four hours without water to wash in, as well as without hairbrush or razor. He thought of himself as presenting the same neat appearance as on the previous evening; but the woman saw him otherwise.
"I wonder if I could have a glass of water?" he asked, his throat almost too parched to let the words come out.
"But sairtainly." She turned to the child, whispering in a foreign language, but using more words than the command to fetch a glass of water would require.
When the child came back, Teddy swallowed the water in one long gulp. The woman asked him if he would like another glass, to which he replied that he would. More instructions followed, and while the woman tied up the sandwiches the little girl came back with the second glass. This Teddy drank more slowly, not noticing as he did so that the little girl slipped away.