“I ain't much to look at.” The threat was out of his voice now. “I ain't eaten nothin' since yisterday, mister, and I got that out of a ash-barrel. I'm up agin it hard. Can't you see I ain't lyin'? You ain't never starved or you'd know. You ain't—” He wavered, his eyes glittering, edged a step nearer, and with a quick lunge made a grab for O'Day's watch.
Felix sidestepped with the agility of a cat, struck straight out from the shoulder, and, with a twist of his fingers in the tramp's neck-cloth, slammed him flat against the wall, where he crouched, gasping for breath. “Oh, that's it, is it?” he said calmly, loosening his hold.
The man raised both hands in supplication. “Don't kill me! Listen to me—I ain't no thief—I'm desperate. When you didn't give me nothin' and I got on to the watch—I got crazy. I'm glad I didn't git it. I been a-walkin' the streets for two weeks lookin' for work. Last night I slep' in a coal-bunker down by the docks, under the bridge, and I was goin' there agin when you come along. I never tried to rob nobody before. Don't run me in—let me go this time. Look into my face; you can see for yourself I'm hungry! I'll never do it agin. Try me, won't you?” His tears were choking him, the elbow of his ragged sleeve pressed to his eyes.
Felix had listened without moving, trying to make up his mind, noting the drawn, haggard face, the staring eyes and dry, fevered lips—all evidences of either hunger or vice, he was uncertain which.
Then gradually, as the man's sobs continued, there stole over him that strange sense of kinship in pain which comes to us at times when confronted with another's agony. The differences between them—the rags of the one and the well-brushed garments of the other, the fact that one skulked with his misery in dark alleys while the other bore his on the open highways—counted as nothing. He and this outcast were bound together by the common need of those who find the struggle overwhelming. Until that moment his own sufferings had absorbed him. Now the throb of the world's pain came to him and sympathies long dormant began to stir.
“Straighten up and let me see your face,” he said at last, intent on the tramp's abject misery. “Out here where the full light can fall on it—that's right! Now tell me about yourself. How long have you been like this?”
The man dragged himself to his feet.
“Ever since I lost my job.” The question had calmed him. There was a note of hope in it.
“What work did you do?”
“I'm a plumber's helper.”