Midnight found him working over the problem of the girl. He recalled old Charley’s last instructions:
“Get her away from the low-brows.”
A promise, Fay had never intentionally broken. There was the girl—naive, doll-like, docile. There was the Dropper—demanding, brutish, a fink.
Fay slept that night at a stag hotel.
He woke early, bathed beneath a shower, dressed and went down to breakfast.
On Harrison Street he gulped the air. He avoided being seen by the detectives of the city. Once he took a cab for a distance of five squares. He dismissed the driver at the side entrance of a cheap hotel—sauntered through the lobby and emerged with a sharp glance to left and right.
The game gripped him as he dodged into the tenement and started climbing the gas-flared stairways to the hop-joint. He knew, in the soul of him, that Chicago was a danger-spot.
He knocked on the door and was admitted by the Dropper—who seemed alone.
“Back again,” said Fay. “I said I’d be back. Where is Emily?”
“Wot t’hell!”