I suppose great generals in their hour of defeat imagine themselves doing the feeblest, foolishest things. As I sat there on the bench, gazing before me, I saw the whole thing—Nancy Olden, after all her bragging, her skirmishing, her hairbreadth scapes and successes, arrested in broad daylight and before witnesses for having stolen a cool, wet bunch of grapes, worth a nickel, for her hot, dry, hungering throat! I saw the policeman that'd do it; he looked like that Sergeant Mulhill I met 'way, 'way back in Latimer's garden. I saw the officer that'd receive me; he had blue eyes like the detective that came for me to the Manhattan. I saw the woman jailer—oh, she was the A.D., all right, who'd receive me without the slightest emotion, show me to a cell and lock the door, as calm, as little triumphant or affected, as though I hadn't once outwitted that cleverest of creatures—and outwitted myself in forestalling her. I saw—
Mag, guess what I saw! No, truly; what I really saw? It made me jump to my feet and grab it with a squeal.
I saw my own purse lying on the gravel almost at my feet, near the little fruit-stand that had tempted me.
Blank empty it was, stripped clean, not a penny left in it, not a paper, not a stamp, not even my key. Just the same I was glad to have it. It linked me in a way to the place. The clever little girl that had stolen it had been here in this park, on this very spot. The thought of that cute young Nance Olden distracted my mind a minute from my worry—and, oh, Maggie darlin', I was worrying so!
I walked up to the fruit-stand with the purse in my hand. The old fellow who kept it looked up with an inviting smile. Lord knows, he needn't have encouraged me to buy if I'd had a penny.
"I want to ask you," I said, "if you remember selling a lot of good things to a little girl who had a purse this—this morning?"
I showed it to him, and he turned it over in his crippled old hands.
"It was full then—or fuller, anyway," I suggested.
"You wouldn't want to get her into trouble—that little girl?" he asked cautiously.
I laughed. "Not I. I—myself—"