“What’s the matter?” asked one voice after another, as the tenements poured their human contents into the street.
“Ophelia’s run over,” explained a powerful Irish woman, with a shawl over her head, who kept her hand on the handle of the car door. “Lady speedin’ run her down like a dog.” An angry murmur rose from the crowd. Gladys shook in her shoes and wondered if she dared start the car with all those children hanging on the front of it. She looked around helplessly for someone who would help her out of her difficulty. Just then a policeman turned into the street, attracted by the crowd.
“Cheese it, de cop!” screamed a ragged gamin, who stood on the step of the car, and the women and children began to slink into the doorways. Gladys waited until he came up, and then explained the whole matter and asked where the nearest hospital was.
“Can’t blame you for hitting that brat,” said the policeman, “she’s the terror of drivers for two blocks.” Ophelia stuck out her tongue at him. Gladys drove her to the hospital where it was discovered that the left arm was broken below the elbow. Painful as the setting may have been there was “never a whang out of her,” as the doctor remarked, although she hung on tightly to Gladys’s white sleeve with her dirty hand. Her waist was taken off to find the extent of the damage, and Gladys was frightened to see that the other arm was fearfully bruised and scratched, and there was a ring of purple and green blotches around her neck like a collar.
“She must have been thrown down harder than I thought,” said Gladys to the nurse.
“Thrown down nothin’,” answered Ophelia, “Old Grady did that the other day when I threw a stone through the winder.” And she held up the mottled arm where all might see.
“Oh,” said Gladys, with a shudder, “cover it up.” Putting Ophelia into the machine again she drove back to the scene of the accident and entered the squalid tenement in which the child said she lived.
“Won’t Old Grady beat me up though, when she finds I’ve busted me wing,” said Ophelia, as they mounted the rickety stairs. Hardly had she spoken when the door at the head of the stairs flew open and a large, red-faced, coarse-looking woman strode out and shook her fist over the banisters.
“I’ll fix ye fer stayin’ out afther I tell ye ter come in, ye little devil,” she shouted. “I’ll break every bone in yer body. Gimme the money for the papers first.”
“Go chase yerself,” said Ophelia, standing still on the stairs with a spiteful gleam in her eye, “there ain’t no money. I ain’t had time ter peddle this afternoon.”