The detective's anxiety to discover the printer's devil in seeking to communicate with some criminal, some noted "crook," on the subject of the theatre, changed to an alert expectation. He believed the boy would seek to communicate with Gorham,—he would make use of his knowledge of the crime in an effort to extort money.
When Ned at last left the car the detective had become so cautious as to follow only at a very considerable distance, so extra-hazardous had his surveillance become, so alertly suspicious seemed the boy. Down and down Ned took his way, through streets that grew more dirty and dingily lighted as he went. The tall, gloomy tenement houses on either hand, for miles, it seemed, apparently leaned toward each other across the way, to limit the sky and exclude the air from the sad purlieus below. Some women were quarreling in shrill, shrewish accents on a corner; one reeled as she walked, and hard by there was a saloon that exuded a dim glow of untrimmed kerosene lamps, a pervasive odor of beer and whiskey, and a series of dirty, frowzy customers of both sexes at all hours of the day and night. It had a more remote trade, too; now and then a child, tangle-haired, begrimed, unnaturally sharp of eye and tongue, yet still suggestive of that universal promise of youth,—dim, dim, not a possibility, hardly a dream, only intimating a higher purpose in its creation,—scuttled out with a pitcher of beer, bearing it carefully away to some drink-sodden wretch in a forlorn attic. The clouds had thickened; they seemed to Ned to-night, though never before, to resemble the clouds of sin and sorrow and suffering that hang over the homes of the wicked and weak, and to prefigure the bursting of the vials of wrath. And search the sky as he would, he could discern no star.
When he had toiled up four flights of a dark, rickety staircase, and opened a door in the rear of the mansard roof, the sudden contrast of the scene within smote upon his quivering nerves, his quickened perceptions, as if he had never before beheld it. The floor was scoured white, and throughout the atmosphere was the pungent aroma of coarse yellow soap. The clean patchwork quilts on the two beds were as gay with many colors as Joseph's coat. The monkey-stove sought to atone for its many misdeeds emblazoned on the smoke-blackened walls, and glowed to a scarlet hue, and upon it simmered the savory dish of onion stew that he loved. His sickly, puny little sister, seated on a home-woven rug in the centre of the floor, found plenteous entertainment in banging a tin cup with an iron spoon, while her mother was busied in the task of wrapping hundreds of bonbons in gayly fringed papers, for this work for the candy factory could be done at home, and the care of the child prevented her from going out to secure better paid work elsewhere.
"That child is the bane of yer life," her neighbors sometimes said, with a species of antagonism toward the hindrance, born, it seemed, only to be a clog and a dead-weight. "Ye had better sen' it to the 'sylum, or somewher's, an' git some use of yerself."
Ned's mother returned no comment, no reply, to these suggestions; sometimes it seemed as if she had some impediment in her speech, so silent she had become, so taciturn with her neighbors. The fact that she was country-bred was shown abundantly in her stolid uncommunicativeness, her vague terror of all the ways of the great city outside of these four walls, her old-fashioned code of manners and morals, and the painfully wrought and maintained cleanliness of her surroundings. No slight task it was, to be sure, to "pack" the water which plentifully drenched floors, tables, pots, kettles, windows, up four flights of steep stairs from the hydrant in the yard! Small wonder that poverty and dirt are so often concomitant. It had been an evil day for her and her simple, untutored husband when some vague, distorted ambition had moved him to despise the small havings of a country-side blacksmith and seek to become a "horse-shoer" among the often mythical advantages of a large town. He had little of the canny thrift characteristic of his Scotch nationality. He was an open-handed, jovial, florid, red-haired, fiery-tempered man,—over sanguine and credulous. The many deceptions practiced upon greenhorns, the greater expense of living, the fierce competition of an already crowded trade, baffled and bewildered the sturdy fellow. He worked as long as he had work, but when he was idle he began to drink more and more, and perhaps at last it was no great misfortune to his family when one of the pestilences which decimate the tenement region laid this once fair stalk of wheat low with the "cheat." He left his wife, Ned, and the puny, sickly little girl as remote, as alien from their old, country home, as if that haven of humble, hearty comfort were in a foreign planet. They lived as best they might on the boy's wages and the few jobs of coarse washing that she could get to do at home. It was the pride of both mother and son that they had maintained this precarious existence on these slender means now for more than a year, and in this fact they saw a glad augury for the future.
Her face always wore, however, an apprehensive, appealing expression, although Ned remembered when it had been otherwise. As she turned it toward him now all her perseverance, her self-sacrifice, her deprivations, her honest, persistent uprightness, her mingled fears and faith in some fair future for him touched his heart with a potent force. He cast but one glance at her and burst instantly into tears.
"What ails ye, sonny?" she asked soothingly, and with an intonation that promised partisanship, earnest and loving; for sometimes he came home with great griefs of editorial tyranny, or fault-finding and injustice in the composing-rooms, or the guying of some facetiously disposed junior reporter, or in a revolt of indignation against the pressure of new and severe regulations—when his partisan mother would straightway vilify his enemies (for the nonce), till he would be sorry for them and rouse himself to protest and remonstrate in their defense.
But now Ned shook his head and would say nothing.
His silence evidently alarmed her. She perceived that his trouble was far more serious than the usual misadventures in the day's work. Once or twice she urged him to speak, but in vain. She looked at him apprehensively for a moment longer, and not without anger. Then as if appreciating the futility of remonstrance, she turned away to the table, took up a flaunting red and gilded paper, and with mechanical swiftness and dexterity twisted the fringed ends.
"Boys are hard to know how to deal with," she remarked. "They can't l'arn no sense, and they ain't got no instinct. A boy ought ter know by nature that he hev got two friends what can't wish him nothing but well. One is his God in Heaven, and the t'other is his mother on earth,—and them is the ones he trusts the least an' trusts the last."