There's Flynn, the cop, across the street. He knows me by sight. He could say he saw me step off the curb. And that's all he could say. I could lose myself from anybody that ever saw me. The string that holds us where we are is so thin that—Why it's a wonder that anybody stays where he is! It's so easy to walk out, completely out!
And then some of Augusta's excited worry came upon him. Rose Wilding might have been stunned by the fall. She might have walked, dazed, right past her own door, right off this curb and into that sea of moving life!
"Is it kiddin' me you are?" snorted officer Flynn. "Lookin' for your boarding mistress! More like, she's lookin' for you."
"No, I'm not," said Jimmie quietly. "I'm right in earnest. Her daughter has it that she fell and struck her head on the curb, and lost—"
"Sure. There'd have to be a daughter in it."
"Oh, go to Blazes!" snapped Jimmie, turning on his heel.
"I might have known better," he growled as he walked away. "They never do anything unless you show them a corpse. And then they'd like to club you for giving them trouble."
He turned south, looking to the only other resource he knew. He was a New Yorker with all of a New Yorker's entire dependence on the two forces that govern his town—the police and the newspapers.
At Astor Place he ran across Jim Ray, a dark little crank of a man, a man who looked as old as the first thing that ever happened, and seemed to have been present at every happening since the first. He was coming from a stormy, snapping interview with an irate, bullying financier, and he was on his way to get the personal story of an interesting adventuress who had gotten herself into jail.
But he listened to Wardwell. In fact, he always listened to everything, until he was sure it was not worth listening to.