The note on the dining room table proved, to the captain’s delight, to be from James Pearson. It was brief and to the point.
“Why don’t you come and see me?” wrote the young man. “I’ve been expecting you, and you promised to come. Have you forgotten my address? If so, here it is. I expect to be in all day to-morrow.”
The consequence of this was that eleven o’clock the next day found Captain Elisha pulling the bell at a brick house in a long brick block on a West Side street. The block had evidently been, in its time, the homes of well-to-do people, but now it was rather dingy and gone to seed. Across the street the first floors were, for the most part, small shops, and in the windows above them doctors’ signs alternated with those of modistes, manicure artists, and milliners.
The captain had come a roundabout way, stopping in at the Moriarty flat, where he found Mrs. Moriarty in a curious state of woe and tearful pride. “Oh, what will I do, sir?” she moaned. “When I think he’s gone, it seems as if I’d die, too. But, thanks to you and Miss Warren—Mary make it up to her!—my Pat’ll have the finest funeral since the Guinny saloon man was buried. Ah, if he could have lived to see it, he’d have died content!”
The pull at the boarding-house bell was answered by a rather slatternly maid, who informed the visitor that she guessed Mr. Pearson was in; he ’most always was around lunch time. So Captain Elisha waited in a typical boarding-house parlor, before a grate with no fire in it and surrounded by walnut and plush furniture, until Pearson himself came hurrying downstairs.
“Say, you’re a brick, Captain Warren!” he declared, as they shook hands. “I hoped you’d come to-day. Why haven’t you before?”
The captain explained his having mislaid the address.
“Oh, was that it? Then I’m glad I reminded you. Rather a cheeky thing to do, but I’ve been a reporter, and nerve is necessary in that profession. I began to be afraid living among the blue-bloods had had its effect, and you were getting finicky as to your acquaintances.”
“You didn’t believe any such thing.”
“Didn’t I? Well, perhaps I didn’t. Come up to my room. I think we can just about squeeze in, if you don’t mind sitting close.”