The bystanders stared.
“There ain’t none nigher’n the station,” replied a girl who was watching the fight with evident relish. She wore a pert sailor hat of soiled white straw, set on one side of her head, and carried her hands in the pockets of a crumpled tan-colored reefer. Her eyes were handsome and bold. The crowd jostled her freely, which did not seem to trouble her. “There’s a fellow just arrested,” she explained cheerfully, “for smashing his wife with a coal-hod; they’re busy with him down to the station. He fit all the way over. It took four cops to hold him. Most the folks are gone over there to see the other game. This fun here won’t be spoiled just yet awhile.”
Something in the expression with which the gentleman regarded her attracted the girl’s attention. She took her hands out of her pockets, and scanned him with a dull surprise; then, with a motion which one could not call abashed, but which fell short of her previous ease of manner, she turned her back and walked a little away towards the edge of the crowd.
The fight was at its hottest. Two men, an Italian laborer and an American fisherman, were somewhat seriously belaboring each other, to their own undisguised satisfaction and the acclamation of the bystanders. Both were evidently more or less drunk. An open grogshop gaped behind them. Similar places of entertainment, with others less easily described, lined both sides of Angel Alley, multiplying fruitfully, till the wharves joined their grimy hands and barred the way to this black fertility.
It was a windy day; the breeze was rising, and the unseen sea could be heard moaning beyond.
Just as the stranger, with the indiscretion of youth and inexperience, was about to step into the ring and try to stop the row, a child pushed through the crowd. It was a boy; a little fellow, barely four or five years old. He ducked under the elbows and between the legs of the spectators with an adroitness which proclaimed him the son of a sailor, and ran straight to the combatants, crying:
“Father! Fa—ther! Marm says to please to stop! She says to ax you to please to stop, and come home wiv you’ little boy!”
He ran between the two men, and put up his little dirty fingers upon his father’s big, clenched hand; he repeated piteously, “Father, Fa—ther, Fa—ther!”
But more than this the little fellow had not time to say. The father’s dark, red face turned a sudden, ominous purple, and before any person of them all could stay him his brutal hand had turned upon the child.
Cries of shame and horror rose from the crowd; a woman’s shriek echoed from a window across the street, and the screams of the boy pierced the bedlam. The Italian, partly sobered, had slunk back.