"You'll come over with me, won't you?"
Mr. Honeybun demurred. "Well, yer see, kid, I'm a pretty remarkable character in this neighborhood. There's lots knows Honey Lem; and if they was to see me go in with you they might think as yer hadn't come by your dough quite hon—I mean, accordin' to yer conscience—or they might be bad enough to suppose as there was a put-up job between us. When I puts a few dollars into my own savings bank—I'm a savin' bird, I am—I goes right over to Brooklyn, where there ain't no wicked mind to suspeck me. So go in by yerself, and say yer wants to open a account. If anyone asks yer, tell him just how the money come to yer, and I don't believe as yer'll run no chanst of no one not believin' yer."
So it was done. Tom came out of the building with his bank book buttoned into his breast pocket, and a conscious enhancement of life.
"And now," Mr. Honeybun suggested, "we'll make tracks for Pappa's and eat."
The "check," like the meal, was light, and Mr. Honeybun paid it. Tom protested, since he had money of his own, but his host took the situation gracefully.
"Lord love yer, kid, ain't I yer next o' kin, as long as yer guv'nor's away? Who sh'd buy yer a lunch if it wasn't me?"
Childhood is naturally receptive. As Romulus and Remus took their food from a wolf when there was no one else to give it them, so Tom Quidmore found it not amazing to be nourished, first by a murderer, and then by a thief. It became amazing, a few years later, on looking back on it; but for the moment murderer and thief were not the terms in which he thought of those who had been kind to him.
Not that he didn't try. He tried that very afternoon. When his next o' kin had gone back to his job of lifting and heaving in the Gansevoort Market, he returned to the empty room. It was his first return to it alone. When he had gone up from his breakfast in the chop saloon both Goodsir and Honeybun had accompanied him. Now the emptiness was awesome, and a little sinister.
He had slept there the previous night, slept fitfully that is, waking every half hour to listen for the shuffling footstep. He heard other footsteps, dragging, thumping, staggering, but they always passed on to the story above, whence would come a few minutes later the sound of heavy boots thrown on the floor. Now and then there were curses, or male voices raised in a wrangle, or a few bars of a drunken song. During the earlier nights he had slept through these signals of Pappa's hospitality, or if he had waked, he knew that a grown-up man lay in the other bed, so that he was safe. Now he could only lie and shudder, till the sounds died down, and silence implied safety. He did his best to keep awake, so as to unlock the door the instant he heard a knock; but in spite of his efforts he slept.
This return after luncheon brought him for the first time face to face with his state as a reality. There was no one there. It was no use going back to Bere, because there would be no one there. Rather than become again a State ward with the Tollivants, he would sell himself to slavery. What was he to do?