“I was on the ’bus, stalled just below Forty-second Street, opposite the Library. I saw a couple of people, a man and a woman, coming down the steps to the street. The woman—Well, I couldn’t begin to tell you how stunning she was. Beauty was just all over her, thick too, from her feet to her head. I remember now the thought struck me as I looked at her that she’d make a brass man turn round to see her when she’d passed. And the goods on her were as sweet and gay as herself—a picture, Mr. Link, a real picture, if ever a woman made one. The man was with her, good-looking and cruel; neat, too, and Hell painted on him so plain it would make an angel throw a fit—if an angel could, supposin’.
“Now Mr. Link I hadn’t looked that long,” Jack snapped his fingers, “before I felt, sir, that they were rotten, not four flushers, but the real bad, like those the Sunday School man told us of, who ‘build a town with blood, and establish a city by iniquity.’” The pause Jack interpolated here was as oracular as the quotation. I did him a great injustice to seem indifferent and impatient. Really I felt the thrill of an inevitable sensation approaching, and—I saw beyond it hypnotizing copy. Jack desiderated encouragement, approval—I looked at the clock over my desk and yawned. Surely it was deliberate malice.
“Like that, sir!” Jack clapped his hands loudly; the ruse broke through my affectation, and startled me into attention that he was keen enough to see was as intense as he wished it to be.
“Like that, sir, they hit out at each other, and there was a fight on! Then a husky— Well, a—white-hope you might have called him—bounced in; they knew him, he knew them, and the three chased off in an automobile. I lost ’em, found ’em, and tracked ’em down east Fifty-eighth Street. She had green stars in her hat—things you could hardly see—but they shone! I found one on a doorstep—and last night I watched the house!”
The typical story teller who at such a juncture lights a cigar, finishes an unsmoked pipe, empties a glass of grog, or rises with unconcealed surprise over his neglect to fulfill an engagement elsewhere, could not have surpassed the self-control with which Jack, for the same purpose, intimated his own retirement. He rose, crushing in his thin fingers his poor bleached blue cap, his small sparkling eyes raised to the clock, which a moment before I had invoked so heartlessly to aid the hypocrisy of my assumed exemption from common weaknesses.
“I think, Mr. Link, it’s time for me to see Mr. Force.” Mr. Force was an assistant in the press-room.
The rebellious spirit of honesty which I had shamelessly essayed to crush, got decidedly the best of the situation now; behind it was the pressure of my own exorbitant curiosity.
“I think Jack, you’ll sit down and finish your story.”
Jack sat down.
“There was a vacant or closed house opposite. I perched on the top step of the porch and glued my eyes on No. —. I think, sir, that if any man or woman inside had winked an eye at me from across the street, I’d have seen it. But it wasn’t light enough for long to watch trifles, and I just kept looking at the front door and the windows. It was right funny how the lights changed. They broke out first on the second floor, then they dropped to the basement, then they climbed to the third story, down again to the first, but they ended in the attic windows and they stayed there. Everything else was as black as the tomb.