JACK LANAGAN had a Sunday off, the first in weeks. A man of whim and caprice in his leisure moments, he had made no plans. This Sunday morning, after idly reading the morning papers, rolling and consuming innumerable brown paper cigarettes meanwhile, he finally sallied forth in his ill-fitting clothes toward the Palace grill and breakfast. And this being luxuriously ended, he was laved and shaved to his heart’s content. Then, perfumed like a boulevardier, he issued forth into Market Street to join that morning throng drifting down toward the ferry building for the institutional Sunday outing across the bay. He permitted himself to drift with the current, perfectly and vastly at ease with all the world. He had switched from cigarettes to an evil Manila, poisoning the air cheerfully for yards around him. Lanagan rather enjoyed the exclusiveness given him by his noisome cigars.
Rourke, Fleming, and little Johnny O’Grady of the Herald, with a camera man, whirled out of Market Street in an automobile, and Lanagan jerked alertly round to watch them out of sight, speculating as to what the story might be. He had half determined to drift over to the office, when Truck One swung into Market Street from O’Farrell. Other fire apparatus was swinging into and out of Market Street, clanging stridently, and Lanagan turned again to the ferry. Fires interested him but little. Always the chance, he remarked once to me fastidiously, of some chump of a fireman squirting water all over you, which spoiled your clothes. I never knew whether Lanagan was having a quiet joke in that or not. His entire wardrobe would have been scorned by a rag picker.
He had been puffing his oakum industriously, and now was attracted by the spectacle of a man beside him nearly doubled over with a fit of coughing. He was shaking and beating at his breast with large, bony hands, and Lanagan noted professionally the rheumatic knuckles and the nails like claws, yellow and dirty. His breath came in sharp whistles, short and staccato, and he was taking possibly a third of a normal respiration at a time.
A particularly violent paroxysm, followed by all evidences of entire suspension of breath, brought Lanagan to the man’s side with a leap. He swung the huddled form against a hydrant.
“Here you!” he called, to a passer-by, “call Douglas 20 and tell them to shoot the harbour ambulance up here.” To himself he said: “This man is sick. He needs attention and needs it quick.”
But at the words the hunched, choking figure straightened spasmodically, flashing a look upon Lanagan that Lanagan, used to malevolence in all its forms expressed upon features the most evil, had not seen quite equalled. Accustomed to the ill-featured and repulsive as they strain through the bars at the city prison, yet even Lanagan started back momentarily in revulsion.
“I have seen misers,” thought Lanagan, “but this is the real miser of all fact and all fiction. I would know him in a million. Fellow I used to see in my dreams when I was a youngster. Pneumonia sure. About six hours for him and then six feet.”
Thus lightly diagnosing and disposing of the man and his case, Lanagan motioned the citizen, who had meantime stopped, to go on with the call. But the strange, gnomelike figure, flashing another look, a singular blend of loathing, hate, fear, and timidity, upon the newspaper man, started to hobble away. Lanagan dropped his hand on the man’s shoulder to restrain him. But the harsh features turned a look so glowering and repellent upon him that he withdrew the restraining hand. The coughing had ceased. The little old man was still breathing sibilantly and swiftly, rather like a panting dog or cat, which he suggested, but by extraordinary effort of will had fought away the more violent exhibition of his seizure. He commenced to shuffle down the street, with one furtive, fearful, backward look that went on past Lanagan and up Market Street.
“You need a hospital, man,” said Lanagan curtly, “and I’m going to take you there. Wait.” He placed his hand again on the man’s shoulder. But the manikin-like creature flung the hand viciously from him and again flashed that strange look of blended hate, fear, and timidity upon the newspaper man.
“Let be!” he grated. “Let be!”