At this Casey sat suddenly forward in his chair, and the streak of light fell full across his face, swollen with tears and streaked with the grime of three awful days. Despite the grime, however, despite the stubble of reddish beard, the unkempt hair and untidy clothes, there was something singularly pathetic about him, with his great, Irish-blue eyes and youthful, innocent-looking face. He had not been drinking for some weeks, and he wore no air of sottishness, nor of vagrancy, nor of any of his other crimes against self and family and society.
"I dunno what I ever done," he had moaned for three days, rocking back and forth in his misery, the tears raining down his unwashed cheeks and splashing from his stubbly chin, "I dunno what I ever done that this thing should 'a' happened t' me! My gyurl! My Ang'la Ann!"
"She were a good gyurl," he said to the detective, sitting suddenly forward.
"So far 's we know, she were," his wife amended, "but she had no sinse yet, bein' so young, an' th' young niver belaves th' old. I don' see how a gyurl o' mine could go wrong, an' me hatin' it th' way I do. But she have more o' him in her nor o' me, down t' thim same shifty blue eyes thot kin look so swate, an' God knows what divilment's behint thim!"
Casey smiled in wan coquetry at this charge against his fascinations, but reiterated in defense of his daughter:
"She were a good gyurl. I seen a piece o' this world, of'cer, an' I kin till—min like us, we kin till gyurls that's merely flightsome from thim that's gon' t' th' bad. If she's bad, I don' want ye t' find her. Jes' show me th' felly thot lied t' her, an' I'll kill him—but I don' want ye t' find her; I don' niver want t' set eyes on her ag'in, if she've brought disgrace on me."
"Ye won't lit it git in th' paapers, will ye?" Mary Casey pleaded for the twentieth time in her brief communications with the police. "Yell kape thim aff av her, won't ye—fer th' love o' Hiven? I'm after tellin' th' childern I'll kill th' first wan o' thim thot breathes t' a soul we don' know wheer Ang'la Ann is. Ag'in' she be all right an' come home some day, it'd go hard wid her if these Sheenies 'round here knew she was gon'—people do belave th' worst of a gyurl, always. I dunno what t' think o' my Ang'la Ann, but I don' want it to go haard wid her if she don' desarve it."
The detective promised about the papers and went his way. A missing girl, with no probable complications of a horrible murder, excited only the feeblest interest at Maxwell Street, and this visit would comprehend the whole of the police activity expended in the case unless Angela Ann should happen to turn up under their incurious noses.
The facts of the case were these: Angela Ann Casey, a slim, under-sized, pretty young thing just under eighteen, had left home on Monday morning, November 7th, apparently to go to work, and had not been seen since by her family or any one they knew. She was an unskilled worker, a bit of flotsam in the industrial whirlpool so cruel to her kind. In the summer she had worked for a few weeks in a cannery, pasting labels on fruit cans. When the cannery shut down, she answered an "ad" for extra help in the rush season of a cap factory, which laid her off when work slackened. And after a fortnight's idleness she was taken on as a bundle-wrapper in a cheap department store, where she met a girl who told her of a place needing more girls for the manufacture of cheap finery for the "levee" trade. Angela Ann applied, and was given work at a knife-pleating machine, at four dollars and a half a week. She was in this job, to the best of her mother's belief, when she disappeared; but a visit to the place on Tuesday laid bare the startling fact that she had "give notice" on Saturday night.
Angela Ann had few intimates; her associates changed with her changes of occupation, and these were so many that she took root nowhere. A girl on Blue Island Avenue, to whose house Angela Ann sometimes went, called at Henry Street Tuesday evening and was told that Angela was out.