I
Henry Street, drowned in November murk, was black as Tartarus and a shade more dreadful, as a heavily built man stumbled along its unfamiliar bumps and intermittent stretches of sidewalk, stopping now and then to peer vainly at doors for a number. Presently he encountered a wisp of a girl with a jacket thrown about her head and shoulders.
"Where's twenty-one?" he asked.
She pointed. "Who d'ye want?"
"Casey."
"In the rear—I'll show ye," and she led the way to a precipitous flight of steps. "Ye go down, an' 'long 's far 's ye kin, thin turn t' th' right an' knock," she said, and disappeared in the mist.
Groping his way, the man reached the end of a long passage between two tenements and knocked at a rear door. A woman opened it.
"Th' ditictive," she murmured, and let him in.
The kitchen was stifling close; a fire raged to the brim of the big, heavily nickeled stove which had cost the Caseys so dear in instalments and in worry. Casey had been working for two weeks, and the bin outside the kitchen door had a ton of soft coal in it. In a bracket above the sink was a lamp whose tin reflector, instead of diffusing the light rays, seemed to concentrate them, like a feeble searchlight, so that the corners of the kitchen were all in gloom, and half-lost in gloom were the forms of the Caseys, whose pallid faces showed sharply against the dusk.
"Had any word?" said the detective, addressing Mrs. Casey. To the relief of the parents and the bitter disappointment of the children, he was a plain-clothes man.