“O, sir! Are you a policeman? Will you take me to where I belong?”
“Sorry to say ‘no’ to both your questions, but I’m only a railway conductor, in a hurry to catch my outgoing train. Wait a minute, child, and a real police officer will come and will look out for you.”
The blue-coated, much brass-buttoned man snatched his hand from her clinging grasp and strode westward in desperate haste. He had calculated his time to the last second and even this trifling delay annoyed him.
But he had prophesied aright. A policeman was coming into view, leisurely sauntering over his beat, and on the lookout for anything amiss. Dorothy hurried forward, planted herself firmly in this man’s path and demanded again:
“Are you a policeman?”
“Sure an’ ’tis that same that I be! Thanks for all mercies! Me first day alone at the job, an’ what can I do for ye, me pretty colleen?”
“Tell me, or take me, back to the ‘Mary Powell,’ please. I—I’ve lost my way.”
“Arrah musha! An’ if I was after doin’ that same I’d be losin’ mine! The ‘Mary Powell’ is it? Tell me where does she be livin’ at. I’m not long in this counthry and but new app’inted to the foruss. Faith it’s a biggish sort of town to be huntin’ one lone woman in.”
To anybody older or wiser than Dorothy Chester the very fact of his loquacity would have betrayed his newness to the “foruss.” There wasn’t a prouder nor happier man in the whole great city, that day, than Larry McCarthy, as he proceeded to explain:
“First cousin on me mother’s side to Alderman Bryan McCarthy, as has helped me over from Connemara, this late whiles, and has made me a free-born Amerikin citizen, glory be.”