Deep in these thoughts, he wandered on at random. He suddenly came to himself in the toughest quarter of Bay City.
Through the summer night shrilled the sound of cachinations painted to the colors of mirth. A cheap piano rattled and thumped through an open window. Men's and women's voices mingled in rising and falling gradations of harshness. Lights streamed irregularly across the dark.
Thorpe became aware of a figure crouched in the door-way almost at his feet. The sill lay in shadow so the bulk was lost, but the flickering rays of a distant street lamp threw into relief the high-lights of a violin, and a head. The face upturned to him was thin and white and wolfish under a broad white brow. Dark eyes gleamed at him with the expression of a fierce animal. Across the forehead ran a long but shallow cut from which blood dripped. The creature clasped both arms around a violin. He crouched there and stared up at Thorpe, who stared down at him.
“What's the matter?” asked the latter finally.
The creature made no reply, but drew his arms closer about his instrument, and blinked his wolf eyes.
Moved by some strange, half-tolerant whim of compassion, Thorpe made a sign to the unknown to rise.
“Come with me,” said he, “and I'll have your forehead attended to.”
The wolf eyes gleamed into his with a sudden savage concentration. Then their owner obediently arose.
Thorpe now saw that the body before him was of a cripple, short-legged, hunch-backed, long-armed, pigeon-breasted. The large head sat strangely top-heavy between even the broad shoulders. It confirmed the hopeless but sullen despair that brooded on the white countenance.
At the hotel Thorpe, examining the cut, found it more serious in appearance than in reality. With a few pieces of sticking plaster he drew its edges together.