"Ye lie! That winder was open, and the river was dark as hell. Ye throwed him in, I tell ye!"
"Nope; I gived him to a woman—"
She stopped and edged toward the stairs, all her old fear of him returning. Reaching the short flight, she bounded up, the cat clinging to her sleeve. Lem did not follow; for the crazy woman had frightened him. He stood with hushed breath, holding grimly to the wooden table. A voice from the deck of the scow came down to him.
"I gived him to a rich woman on a yacht. He's rich with mints of money. Yer kid's a gentleman, Lem Crabbe!"
He sprang after her to the deck; but nothing greeted him save the cry of an owl from the ragged rocks and the glistening green of the cat's eyes as Scraggy hurried away.
CHAPTER SIX
After eating his supper, Lon, sullen and moody, looked out upon the lake, reviewing in his mind the terrible revenge he was soon to complete. He took his pipe slowly from his pocket and filled it with coarse tobacco. Soon gray rings lifted themselves to the ceiling and faded into the rafters. As the smoke curled upward, his mind became busy with the past, and so vivid was his imagination that outlined in the smoke rings that floated about him was a girlish face—a face pale and wan, but a loving, sweet one to him. He could see the fair curls which clung close to the head; the eyes, serious but kind, seemed to strike his memory in unforgotten glances. To another than himself the smoke-formed face would have been plain, perhaps ugly, the weakness of her race showing in every feature; but not to him. So intent was he with these thoughts that the present dissolved completely into the past, and beside him stood a small, fond woman. In his imagination she had risen from that grave which he had never been able to find in the Potter's Field. The personality of his dead wife called upon his senses and made itself as necessary to him then as in the moment of his first rapture when she had placed her womanly might upon his soul.
His revenge upon Floyd Vandecar would be finished when the gray-eyed Flea, so like her own father, went away with the one-armed man, to eke out her destiny amid the squalor of the thief's home.