“It's kind ye are,” returned the other. “But how can I be beholden?”
“You won't be. It's you that will be doing the favor. As soon as you're well enough—”
“I'm well enough now. There's nothing the matter with me.” But her voice was without life or hope.
So, in many slow sittings, the Bonnie Lassie sculped Molly Dunstan; and from those sittings grew the heart-moving bronze, “The Broken Wing,” a figure of a quaintly, pitifully birdlike woman in the foreground of a group in a hospital clinic, with the verdict of science written in her face, looking out upon life in the dread realization of helplessness. As the work progressed the heart of Molly Dunstan opened little by little, and her story came out.
While a young girl in a good Irish school she had met a traveling American, Henry Dunstan, and, half for love and half in the elfin Irish spirit of adventurousness, had run away with him. He was a good husband to her, and they were happy in a little country place which he had bought and which she turned to skillful account, raising ducks and chickens for the market to eke out his income—“until the drink took him.” It took him the full length of its well-beaten path, from debt to ruin; from ruin to broken will and health, and presently to death. When his debts were cleared up the place was gone, and the little widow had a scant two thousand dollars of his life insurance in the bank. Being sturdy, able, and courageous, she had come to New York, had found some fine sewing to do, and had maintained herself, always with the idea of getting back into the country and to her poultry raising, which she loved. Here the simple story came to a full stop with the words: “So I bought a bit of a place, and they took it away from me.”
“Who took it away from you?” asked the Bonnie Lassie.
“Mr. Wiggett,” replied Molly, and fell into such a fit of shuddering that the Bonnie Lassie forebore to question her further concerning the transaction.
Little by little, however, there came out bits of information which the Bonnie Lassie deftly wove together, with the eventual result that Cyrus the Gaunt looked up an advertisement in a certain newspaper famous for its traps and pitfalls, and paid a visit to the office, on St. Mark's Place, of “D. Wiggett & Co., City and Suburban Real Estate.” He returned much depressed, declaring that the laws against homicide ought to provide for exceptions in the case of such persons as D. Wiggett.
“There he sat and grinned, a great, plump, pink, powerful, smirking gorilla; and said that the transaction with Mrs. Dunstan was perfectly legal—perfectly—and there wasn't anything further to be said.”
“Did you say it?” inquired the Bonnie Lassie, who knew her Cyrus.