It was Muffles!
Not a tramp; not a ragged, blear-eyed vagabond—older, more serious, the laugh gone out of his eyes, the cheeks pale as if from long confinement. Dressed in dark clothes, his face cleanshaven; linen neat, a plain black tie—the hat worn straight, not slouched over his eyes with a rakish cant as in the old days.
"My God! but I'm glad to see ye," he cried. "Come over in the Square and let's sit down."
He was too excited to let me ask him any questions. It all poured out of him in a torrent, his hand on my knee most of the time.
"Oh, but I had it tough! Been up for a year. You remember about it, the time Pipes went bail. I didn't git none o' the swag; it warn't my job, but I seed 'em through. But that warn't nothin'. It was de Missus what killed me. Hadn't been for de kids I'd been off the dock many a time. Fust month or two I didn't draw a sober breath. I couldn't stand it. Soon's I'd come to I'd git to thinkin' agin and then it was all up wid me. Then Pipes and de Sheriff went back on me and I didn't care. Bowser stuck to me the longest. He got de kids took care of. He don't know I'm out, or he'd turn up. I tried to find him, but nobody don't know where he was a-workin'—none of de barrooms I've tried. Oh, but it was tough! But it's all right now, d'ye hear? All right! I got a job up in Harlem, see? I'm gittin' orders for coal." And he touched a long book that stuck out of his breast-pocket. "And I've got a room near where I work. And I tell ye another thing," and his hand sought mine, and a peculiar light came into his eyes, "I got de kids wid me. You just oughter see de boy—legs on him thick as your arm! I toll ye that's a comfort, and don't you forgit it. And de little gal! Ain't like her mother? what!—well, I should smile!"
HIS LAST CENT
Jack Waldo stood in his studio gazing up at the ceiling, or, to be more exact, at a Venetian church-lamp—which he had just hung and to which he had just attached a red silk tassel bought that morning of a bric-a-brac dealer whose shop was in the next street. There was a bare spot in that corner of his sumptuously appointed room which offended Waldo's sensitive taste—a spot needing a touch of yellow brass and a note of red—and the silk tassel completed the color-scheme. The result was a combination which delighted his soul; Jack had a passion for having his soul delighted and an insatiable thirst for the things that did the delighting, and could no more resist the temptation to possess them when exposed for sale than a confirmed drunkard could resist a favorite beverage held under his nose. That all of these precious objects of bigotry and virtue were beyond his means, and that most of them then enlivening his two perfectly appointed rooms were still unpaid for, never worried Jack.
"That fellow's place," he would say of some dealer, "is such a jumble and so dark that nobody can see what he's got. Ought to be very grateful to me that I put 'em where people could see 'em. If I can pay for 'em, all right, and if I can't, let him take 'em back. He always knows where to find 'em. I'm not going to have an auction."
This last course of "taking his purchases back" had been followed by a good many of Jack's creditors, who, at last, tired out, had driven up a furniture van and carted the missing articles home again. Others, more patient, dunned persistently and continually—every morning some one of them—until Jack, roused to an extra effort, painted pot-boilers (portrait of a dog, or a child with a rabbit, or Uncle John's exact image from a daguerrotype many years in the family) up to the time the debt was discharged and the precious bit of old Spanish leather or the Venetian chest or Sixteenth Century chair became his very own for all time to come.