“Good-morning,” said Jimmie Dale pleasantly.
It was a squalid place, a miserable hole, in which a single flickering, yellow gas jet gave light. It was almost bare of furniture; there was nothing but a couple of cheap chairs, a rickety table—unpawnable. A boy, he was hardly more than that, perhaps twenty-two, from a posture in which he was huddled across the table with head buried in out-flung arms, sprang with a startled cry to his feet.
“Good-morning,” said Jimmie Dale again. “Your name's Hagan, Bert Hagan—isn't it? And you work for Isaac Brolsky in the secondhand shop over on West Broadway—don't you?”
The boy's lips quivered, and the gaunt, hollow, half-starved face, white, ashen-white now, was pitiful.
“I—I guess you got me,” he faltered “I—I suppose you're a plain-clothes man, though I never knew dicks wore masks.”
“They don't generally,” said Jimmie Dale coolly. “It's a fad of mine—Bert Hagan.”
The lad, hanging to the table, turned his head away for a moment—and there was silence.
Presently Hagan spoke again. “I'll go,” he said numbly. “I won't make any trouble. Would—would you mind not speaking loud? I—I wouldn't like her to know.”
“Her?” said Jimmie Dale softly.
The boy tiptoed across the room, opened a connecting door a little, peered inside, opened it a little wider—and looked over his shoulder at Jimmie Dale.