He dug his hands impulsively into his side-pockets—and, one hand encountering the chisel, he smiled with a kind of cool, composed satisfaction. Between this barren and God-forsaken hole and this bit of steel there had been been a connection that was both intimate and pertinent. For nine years, ever since he had run away from school, the kind of existence this place stood for had got his goat—that was the reason why he had put the chisel in his pocket.
The room had served its purpose better than any other place of like circumstances and surroundings would have served him—he had, indeed, chosen this particular room very carefully—but the place had always got his goat. He had had to have a room somewhere—he had taken it here. There were many reasons why he had selected this one. It was cheap; and it was among the only class of people with whom he had ever had a chance to associate—the hangers-on of the race-tracks, the dance-hall crowd of the Barbary Coast, the night world of 'Frisco. He knew every one here—he knew the crooks and the lags of the underworld. These latter had time and again even tried to inveigle him into active membership in their fraternity. They wanted him. They had even paid him the compliment of telling him he would make the slickest crook in the United States. He had refused. The game didn't look good enough. It was all piker stuff. It wasn't morality that had held him back... his morality was the morality of his environment... nine years of it... what was morality anyhow?... as far as he could make out it was simply a question of whatever you do don't get caught. And he had seen some of the upper crust playing at morality, too! Sure, he knew what morality was—he had seen a lot of it in his nineteen years!
“Well, what do you know about that!” said Dave Henderson aloud, in a sort of surprised voice. “Sounds like I'm arguing with myself whether I ought to do this or not. Say, wouldn't that sting you! There's nothing to it! It's what you get for waiting—a lone hand that cops the sweepstakes, and sets you up for keeps like a nabob!”
He went to the door, opened it slightly, and listened. Upstairs he could hear Tooler moving about. That was another reason why he had, having once taken the room, remained on as the sole lodger in this house. Tooler minded his own business—and Mrs. Tooler couldn't help minding hers. Mrs. Tooler was a paralytic. They were a couple well beyond middle age, and, having been thrifty in their early days, had purchased this house here some fifteen years ago. The neighborhood, even if still a cheap neighborhood at that time, had been a little more refined in those days. It had changed for the worse since then, but having invested their savings the subsequent changes had to be borne, that was all. It hadn't apparently affected Tooler very much. The man was naturally sour anyhow, and Mrs. Tooler's illness hadn't changed him into what might be called, by any stretch of the imagination, genial! He was a mechanic of some sort; but his work had been spasmodic—Mrs. Tooler could not always be left alone.
Dave Henderson frowned. Tooler evidently wasn't coming down; but Tooler, for all that, must, if the necessity arose, be the means of establishing an alibi, and that required something of at least a definite recognition by Tooler of his, Dave Henderson's, presence. He stepped abruptly out into the hall.
“Heh, Tooler!” he called. “Tooler!”
A door opened somewhere above.
“Hello!” snapped a gruff voice.
“It's me,” announced Dave Henderson.
“I heard you!” grunted Tooler.