II
The night was wild. New York can show such in late November. A gale from the northeast was driving before it a heavy sleet that froze as it fell, coating the overhead wires and glazing the asphalt and sidewalks.
It lacked an hour of midnight. From Fleischmann's bakery, the goal of each man among the shivering hundreds lined up on Tenth Street, the light streamed out upon a remnant of Life's jetsam—that which is submerged, which never comes to the surface unless drawn there by some searching and rescuing hand; that which the home-sheltered never see by daylight, never know, save from hearsay. In the neighboring rectory of Grace Church one dim light was burning in an upper room. The marble church itself looked a part of the winter scene; its walls and pinnacles, already encrusted with ice crystals, glittered fantastically in the rays of the arc-light; beneath them, the dark, shuffling, huddling line of humanity moved uneasily in the discomfort of the keen wind.
At twelve o 'clock, each unknown, unidentified human unit in that line, as he reaches the window, puts forth his hand for the loaf, and thrusting it beneath his coat, if he be so fortunate as to have one, or under his arm, vanishes....
Whither? As well ask: Whence came he?
Well up towards the bakery, because the hour was early, stood Champney Googe, unknown, unidentified as yet by three men, Father Honoré and two detectives, who from the dark archway of a sunken area farther down the street were scanning this bread-line. The man for whom they were searching held his head low. An old broad-brimmed felt hat was jammed over his forehead, almost covering his eyes. The face beneath its shadow was sunken, drawn; the upper lip, chin, and cheeks covered with a three weeks' growth of hair that had been blackened with soot. The long period of wandering in the Maine wilderness had reduced his clothes to a minimum. His shoes were worn, the leather split, showing bare flesh. Like hundreds of others in like case, he found himself forced into this line, even at the risk of detection, through the despairing desperation of hunger. There was nothing left for him but this—that is, if he were not to starve. And after this, there remained for him but one thing, one choice out of three final ones—he knew this well: flight and expatriation, the act of grace by which a man frees himself from this life, or the penitentiary. Which should it be?
"Never that last, never!" he said over and over again to himself during this last month. "Never, never that!"
It was the horror of that which spurred him to unimaginable exertion in the wilderness in order to escape the detectives on his track; to put them off the scent; to lead them to the Canada border and so induce them to cross it in their search. He had succeeded; and thereafter his one thought was to get to New York, to that metropolis where the human unit is reduced to the zero power, and can dive under, even vanish, to reappear only momently on the surface to breathe. But having reached the city, by stolen rides on the top of freight cars, and plunging again into its maelstrom, he found himself still in the clutch of this unnamable horror. Docks, piers, bridges, stations were become mere detective terminals to him—things to be shunned at all cost. The long perspective of the avenues, the raking view from river to river in the cross streets, afforded him no shelter from watching eyes—in every passing glance he read his doom; these, too, were things to be avoided at all hazard.
For four nights, since he sought refuge in New York, he had crawled into an empty packing-box in a black alley behind a Water Street wholesale house. Twice, during this time, he had made the attempt to board as stowaway an outward-bound steamship and sailing vessel for a South American port; but he had failed, for the Eyes were upon him—always the Eyes wherever he went, whenever he looked, Eyes that were spotting him. In the weakness consequent upon prolonged fasting and the protracted exposure during his journey from Maine, this horror was becoming an obsession bordering on delirium. It was even now beginning to dull the two senses of sight and hearing—at least, he imagined it—as he stood in line waiting for the loaf that should keep him another day, keep him for one of two alternatives: flight, if possible to South America, or ...