The cabman on his perch drove with his coat collar turned up and his chin on his breast. He held the reins listlessly, permitting the horse to choose its own gait. At times he lifted the little trap door in the roof of the cab and peered into the interior; occasionally his hand, tentatively, hesitantly, edged toward a bulge in his coat pocket-only to be drawn back again in a sort of panic haste.
The cab turned into a street where, in spite of the drizzle, hawkers with their push-carts under flaring, spitting gasoline banjoes were doing a thriving business. The horse went more slowly. There was very little room. With the push-carts lining the curbs on both sides, and the overflow of pedestrians from the sidewalks into the street, it was perhaps over-taxing the horse's instinct to steer a safe course for the vehicle it dragged behind it. Halfway along the block a wheel of the hansom bumped none too gently into one of the push-carts, nearly upsetting the latter. The hawker, with a frantic grab, saved his wares from disaster-by an uncomfortably narrow margin, and, this done, hurled an impassioned flood of lurid oratory at the two-wheeler.
The cabman lifted his chin from his breast, stared stonily at the hawker, slapped the reins mechanically on the roof of the cab as an intimation to the horse to proceed, and the cab wended its way along again.
At the end of the block, it turned the corner, and drew up before a small building that was nested in between two tenements. The cabman climbed down from his perch, and stood for a moment surveying the three gilded balls that hung over the dingy doorway, and the lettering—“Paul Veniza. Pawnbroker”—that showed on the dully-lighted windows which confronted him.
He drew his hand across his eyes; then, reaching suddenly inside the cab, lifted a bundle in his arms, and entered the shop. A man behind the counter stared at him, and uttered a quick ejaculation. The cabman went on into a rear room. The man from behind the counter followed. In the rear room, a woman rose from a table where she had been sewing, and took the bundle quickly from the cabman's arms, as it emitted a querulous little cry.
The cabman spoke for the first time.
“She's dead,” he said heavily.
The woman, buxom, middle-aged, stared at him, white-faced, her eyes filling suddenly with tears.
“She died an hour ago,” said the cabman, in the same monotonous voice. “I thought mabbe you'd look after the baby girl for a bit, Mrs. Veniza—you and Paul.”
“Of course!” said the woman in a choked voice. “I wanted to before, but—but your wife wouldn't let the wee mite out of her sight.”