"Must be. Can you help me?"
Annie looked straight at him, a humorous little quirk to her mouth.
"Say, what're you askin' me to do—t'row down my steady?"
Which remark carries us back a few days to one sunny afternoon after Clay's midnight call when he had dropped round to see Miss Annie. They had walked over to Gramercy Park and sat down on a bench as they talked. Most men and all women trusted Clay. He had in him some quality of unspoken sympathy that drew confidences. Before she knew it Annie found herself telling him the story of her life.
Her father had been a riveter in a shipyard and had been killed while she was a baby. Later her mother had married unhappily a man who followed the night paths of the criminal underworld. Afterward he had done time at Sing Sing. Through him Annie had been brought for years into contact with the miserable types that make an illicit living by preying upon the unsuspecting in big cities. Always in the little Irish girl there had been a yearning for things clean and decent, but it is almost impossible for the poor in a great city to escape from the environment that presses upon them.
She was pretty, and inevitably she had lovers. One of these was "Slim" Jim Collins, a confidential follower of Jerry Durand. He was a crook, and she knew it. But some quality in him—his good looks, perhaps, or his gameness—fascinated her in spite of herself. She avoided him, even while she found herself pleased to go to Coney with an escort so well dressed and so glibly confident. Another of her admirers was a policeman, Tim Muldoon by name, the same one that had rescued Clay from the savagery of Durand outside the Sea Siren. Tim she liked. But for all his Irish ardor he was wary. He had never asked her to marry him. She thought she knew the reason. He did not want for a wife a woman who had been "Slim" Jim's girl. And Annie—because she was Irish too and perverse—held her head high and went with Collins openly before the eyes of the pained and jealous patrolman.
Clay had come to Annie Millikan now because of what she had told him about "Slim" Jim. This man was one of Durand's stand-bys. If there was any underground work to be done it was an odds-on chance that he would be in charge of it.
"I'm askin' you to stand by a poor girl that's in trouble," he said in answer to her question.
"You've soitainly got a nerve with you. I'll say you have. You want me to throw the hooks into Jim for a goil I never set me peepers on. I wisht I had your crust."
"You wouldn't let Durand spoil her life if you could stop it."
"Wouldn't I? Hmp! Soft-soap stuff. Well, what's my cue? Where do I come in on this rescue-the-be-eutiful heroine act?"