“Not precisely”—David Ellsworth peered over the rims of his glasses at the package—“but I should say around a couple of thousand dollars. I—er—promised him that, if he turned out to be deserving, and I’d——”
“There are two thousand dollars here exactly,” said Billy Kane a little curtly. “What I understood that you promised him was that you would start him up in life again, but it doesn’t require two thousand dollars to start a man of his type going as a photographer.”
“H’m! Don’t you think so, Billy?” David Ellsworth’s blue eyes were twinkling, and he was drawling his words. “Well, let’s see! Now, first of all, judging from the photographic landscape he showed me, the man’s a real artist, and he ought to have the best of tools to work with. A good lens is a rather expensive commodity. I’m not much up on photographic apparatus, but I’ll bet you could pay as high as a thousand dollars for one outfit. And then there’s all the paraphernalia, and a little place to furnish, and a little something to keep things going until returns come in. Two thousand dollars—shucks, my boy! Indeed as a matter of fact, now that you call my attention to it and I come to think it over, Billy, I’m not sure that two thousand dollars is——”
And then Billy Kane laughed, and picked up the money, and went to the door.
“All right, sir, I’ll go—at once,” he said, laughing again.
[II—THE CRIME]
Upstairs in his room Billy Kane changed from his dinner clothes into a dark tweed suit, a very less noticeable attire for that neighborhood where Antonio Laverto had his miserable home, and choosing a slouch hat, left the house. A bus took him down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square, and from there, crossing over Broadway, he continued on down the Bowery.
It was still early; and it was as though the night world here had not yet awakened from its day’s slumber. The “gape wagons” had not yet begun to bring their slumming parties to rub shoulders with the flotsam and jetsam of the underworld, and to shudder in pharisaical horror at “planted” fakes; true, the ubiquitous gasoline lamps glowed in useless yellow spots against the entirely adequate street lighting in front of many shops of all descriptions, and the pavements were alive with men, women and children of every conceivable nationality and station in life, but—Billy Kane smiled a little grimly, for he had learned a great deal, a very great deal in the last three months, about this section of his city—it was still early, and it was not yet the Bowery of the night.
Some half dozen blocks along, Billy Kane turned into a cross street and headed deeper into the East Side.
And now Billy Kane’s forehead drew together in puckered furrows, as he approached the lodging of Antonio Laverto, the cripple. In the inside pocket of his vest were two thousand dollars in cash, for the outlay of which, in spite of the old millionaire’s attitude in reference to it, he, Billy Kane, held himself morally responsible. The frown deepened. It was strange, very strange! He had logically convinced himself that Laverto’s was a worthy case—but the intuition that something was wrong would not down, and the nearer he approached the miserable and squalid dwelling in which the Italian lived, the stronger that intuition grew.