"He is very busy, but I feel sure that he will attend to this if I ask him. I'll see him to-night. Don't brood over it too much and never mind about the washing. I will have Mr. Shagarach call at the station and talk with Walter, and then let you know. Good-night."
"Good-night and bless you," said Mrs. Riley, holding the little candlestick high at the landing. Emily picked her way down two crazy flights of stairs and a doorway barred with sprawling children on to the sidewalk. "While we wink, the lightning may have flashed," was a motto she had copied out of an old book of maxims and embroidered into her life; so, without taking time even for a wink, she hailed a passing car that would carry her near Shagarach's house.
Not all that Mrs. Riley had said of her boy, the Whistler, should be set down to a mother's partiality. Mischievous Walter was, if the unquenchable avidity for excitement which reigns at fourteen entitles a boy to such an aspersion. The five hours' rigid confinement at a school desk especially provoked him to perpetual fidget, and no teacher had yet been found who could make him buckle to his books so long. Yet he was a favorite with one and all, less because of his deft hand at the drawing lesson than because of the real salubrity of his nature, which made him exceptional among the slum children who were his fellow-pupils.
To these very schoolmates Walter figured as a hero, an Admirable Crichton, invincible at all games and master of most things worth knowing for boys. There was no swimmer of his age could equal him in grace or speed, and his dive from the top of the railroad dock was famous in local annals. So was his successful set-to in the brewery yard with Lefty Dinan, the Tenth street cock-of-the walk.
Yet for all his proficiency in the art of give, take and avoid, Walter was the least combative of boys, being, as his mother said, "loving" in disposition. The great gray Percherons with shaggy fetlocks, that drew the fire-engines, knew this, and admitted him to a brotherly comradeship, bowing with delight when he patted and stroked them. Mechanics found him handy beyond his years, and often employed him at odd jobs. For he had a carpenter's eye for short distances and a surveyor's for long, and there was no tool that did not fit his fingers. If he had run away to join the circus last summer, that was not the unpardonable sin.
Shagarach heard Emily gravely.
"An important witness for our cause," he answered, when she had finished. "We surely cannot suffer him to be thrust into prison." Emily knew that it was unnecessary for her to press the matter further, so she spent a brief evening in conversation with the quaint, affectionate mother, rarely alluding to the Floyd case or the mysterious oaf who had so alarmed her in that oriental room.
The following noon she ran down to the jail to see Robert, half-expecting to hear him playing the violin which she had sent him the day before. Robert's own Stradivarius, with all his other personal effects, had been destroyed at the fire, so Emily, having begged the sheriff's permission, had pinched herself to buy him a new one as richly toned as her slender means could purchase. Her own instrument was the piano, whose keys turned to silver beneath her touch, and it had been in the ensemble classes of the conservatory that she and Robert (through Beulah Ware) first met. When Dr. Silsby, the botanist, who had just come home from the west, called yesterday, she had insisted on his taking the violin to Robert, without betraying the giver's name. However, Robert's corridor (murderers' row, the name made her indignant) was silent when she approached it, and she searched his cell vainly for a violin box.
"Dr. Silsby has been to see you, Robert?" she asked, after the greetings due from sweetheart to sweetheart.
"He came in yesterday to cheer me."