“I vill not vip you now,” said the old butcher solemnly, too delighted to think of punishment after having feared every horror under the sun, “aber, go not oudt any more. Keep off de streads so late. I von’t haf it. Dot loafer, aber—let him yussed come here some more! I fix him!”
“No, no,” said the fat mother tearfully, smoothing her daughter’s hair. “She vouldn’t run avay no more yet, no, no.” Old Mrs. Rogaum was all mother.
“Well, you wouldn’t let me in,” insisted Theresa, “and I didn’t have any place to go. What do you want me to do? I’m not going to stay in the house all the time.”
“I fix him!” roared Rogaum, unloading all his rage now on the recreant lover freely. “Yussed let him come some more! Der penitentiary he should haf!”
“Oh, he’s not so bad,” Theresa told her mother, almost a heroine now that she was home and safe. “He’s Mr. Almerting, the stationer’s boy. They live here in the next block.”
“Don’t you ever bother that girl again,” the sergeant was saying to young Almerting as he turned him loose an hour later. “If you do, we’ll get you, and you won’t get off under six months. Y’ hear me, do you?”
“Aw, I don’t want ’er,” replied the boy truculently and cynically. “Let him have his old daughter. What’d he want to lock ’er out for? They’d better not lock ’er out again though, that’s all I say. I don’t want ’er.”
“Beat it!” replied the sergeant, and away he went.
WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR?
It was a sweltering noon in July. Gregory, after several months of meditation on the warning given him by his political friend, during which time nothing to substantiate it had occurred, was making ready to return to the seaside hotel to which his present prosperity entitled him. It was a great affair, the Triton, about sixty minutes from his office, facing the sea and amid the pines and sands of the Island. His wife, ‘the girl,’ as he conventionally referred to her, had been compelled, in spite of the plot which had been revealed or suggested, owing to the ailing state of their child, to go up to the mountains to her mother for advice and comfort. Owing to the imminence of the fall campaign, however, he could not possibly leave. Weekdays and Sundays, and occasionally nights, he was busy ferreting out and substantiating one fact and another in regard to the mismanagement of the city, which was to be used as ammunition a little later on. The mayor and his “ring,” as it was called, was to be ousted at all costs. He, Gregory, was certain to be rewarded if that came to pass. In spite of that he was eminently sincere as to the value and even the necessity of what he was doing. The city was being grossly mismanaged. What greater labor than to worm out the details and expose them to the gaze of an abused and irritated citizenship?