X AND LEARN THE WAYS OF ITS LOGIC.
He had just risen from a bed upon which he had been seated,—a plain, white, iron bed with a red quilt. He looked me over and, welcoming me, waved me to a chair, a plain, wooden chair, not new.
The room was ordinary with striped, cheap paper on the walls; it had a floor of soft wood with a circle of rag carpet; besides the bed and chair, there was a washstand boasting of a bowl and pitcher. Altogether these were the furnishings which a person reared on Astor Street knows to exist but which he has seen only when he has happened to pass an express wagon heaped with the effects of a Halsted Street moving or when, detouring by some strange road, he comes upon the fruit of an “eviction.”
By some amazing transmutation, the man before me fitted the furnishings as he fitted the too “tailored” suit, too narrow in lapels, too belted at the waist, too conspicuously “patch pocketed.” He wore a shirt of too obvious silk and overdecorated shoes; and he wore them as if he had been bred to aspire to them and to nothing else.
A look at him and I knew why the police, in all the time they had searched since the robbery of Dorothy Crewe, had never picked him up. They had been searching for an Astor Street resident in some such garments as Jerry had worn by the river; they had expected him, when casting off his accustomed clothes, to don rough, contrasting attire; no one would have expected him to outdo, in his garb, himself as he had appeared before. I, least of all.
Now I understood that this must be his costume when in daytime he had to risk the streets; and I believed that a dozen detectives might meet him, give another glance at his face, but after looking him over, they would laugh at themselves for suspecting him. “Here’s a Halsted Street flash,” they would say, “trying to make himself look like an Astor Street swell. Jerry Fanneal, of Astor Street, would never do that.” An officer, bringing in such a man, would make himself the smile of his station.
You would think that I would have said to myself, “This is Keeban.” But the fact was I didn’t suspect him; I was sure at once that he was Jerry. Noticing him more closely, I observed that he had carried his change of caste even into the cut of his hair. No longer was it “feathered” in back in the manner of a University Club barber; he was clipped and shaven on the neck with his hair thickening toward the top till it became almost a tossing mane on the crown.
“This is your room, Jerry?” I said. I’d been wondering all the time where and how he’d been living.