"Bully!"
"Well, suppose you come back and try it again to-night. Be here at six. Will you?"
"Will I!" gasped the boy. "You can just bet your gran'mudder's suspenders dat I will!"
When David returned at six, after another day of hopeless search, he found Tom sitting in the doorway of the tenement. The boy's face lighted up with his lop-sided smile; David felt a quick glow at having someone to give him a welcoming look—even though that someone were only a ragged, stunted boy in an old slouch hat that from time to time slipped down and eclipsed the sharp face.
They had dinner, and after it they set forth on a walk. David left the guidance to Tom, and the boy led the way down the Bowery, where, to the hellish music of elevated trains, and by the garish light that streamed from restaurants, pawnshops, music-halls and saloons, moved the all-night procession of thieves and thugs, cheap sports and cheap confidence men, gutter-rags of men and women, girls whose bold, roving eyes sought markets for their charms—all those whom we of sheltered morals are wont to consider the devil's irretrievable share, without thinking much, or caring much, as to why they should be his. Tom's tongue maintained a constant commentary on everything they passed; to talk was clearly one of his delights. What he said was interesting, and was given a grotesque vivacity by his snappy diction of the streets; but David shivered again and again at the knowledge he had where he should have had ignorance.
The boy was erudite in the wickedness of this part of the city. That innocent-looking second-hand store, which was run by the fat old woman in the doorway, was in reality a "fence;" that laundry was an opium den; in the back of that brilliantly-lighted club-room, whose windows were labelled "The Three Friends' Association," there was a gambling joint; that saloon was the hang-out of a gang of men and women thieves; in that music hall, through whose open door they glimpsed a dancer in a red knee-skirt doing the high kick, the girls got their brief admirers drunk and picked their pockets;—and so on, and on, missing nothing that he should not have known.
At Chatham Square they turned into the Jewish quarter and shouldered homeward through narrow streets that from wall to wall were a distracting entanglement of playing children, baby carriages, families on door-steps, promenading lovers, hurrying men, arguing groups, flambeau-lighted pushcarts whose bent and bearded proprietors offered the chaotic crowd every commodity from cucumbers to clothes. The latter part of their walk took them by St. Christopher's, through the glowing colours of the Morton memorial window; and the Mission came in for a few of Tom's sentences. It was a great place to steal women's pocketbooks. "A lot o' swell ladies from Fift' Avenoo comes down dere to monkey wid de kids—hell knows what for. Dere easy fruit. I pinched two or t'ree fat leathers dere meself."
David marvelled at the boy's intimacy with wickedness, yet he understood it. Evil was the one thing Tom had had a chance to become acquainted with; it had for him the familiar face that virtue has for children raised amid happier circumstances. The conditions of its childhood, whether good or bad, are the normal conditions of life to the child. So to Tom wickedness was normal; he talked of stealing, of gambling, of women, with the natural vivacity that another boy might have talked of his marbles.
David saw, as definitely as the calendar sees to-morrow, the future of this boy if there were no influence counter to the influence that was now sweeping him toward his fate. He saw arrest (Tom had boasted that he had been arrested once)—prison—a hardening of the boy's nature—a life of crime. He heard little of the rest of the boy's chatter, and presently he came to a decision—a very unpretentious decision, for he was poorer than poverty, and what confidence he once had in his personal influence had slipped away. But the little he could do for the boy, that he would do.
"How would you like to stay with me for awhile, Tom?" he asked when they were back in his room. "I can't offer you anything but the floor for a bed—and perhaps not that after a few weeks."