THE GIRL FROM FARRIS'S
By Edgar Rice Burroughs
THE GIRL FROM FARRIS'S
By Edgar Rice Burroughs
JUST what Mr. Doarty was doing in the alley back of Farris's at two of a chill spring morning would have puzzled those citizens of Chicago who knew Mr. Doarty best.To a casual observer it might have appeared that Mr. Doarty was doing nothing more remarkable than leaning against a telephone pole, which in itself might have been easily explained had Mr. Doarty not been so palpably sober; but there are no casual observers in the South Side levee at two in the morning -- those who are in any condition to observe at all have the eyes of ferrets.
This was not the first of Mr. Doarty's nocturnal visits to the vicinage of Farris's. For almost a week he had haunted the neighborhood between midnight and dawn, for Mr. Doarty had determined to "get" Mr. Farris.
From the open doors of a corner saloon came bursts of bacchanal revelry -- snatches of ribald song; hoarse laughter; the hysterical scream of a woman; but though this place, too, was Farris's and the closing hour long passed Mr. Doarty deigned not to notice so minor an infraction of the law.
Hadn't Lieutenant Barnut filed some ninety odd complaints against the saloon-keeper-alderman of the Eighteenth Ward for violation of this same ordinance, only to have them all pigeonholed in the city prosecutor's office? Hadn't he appeared in person before the September Grand Jury, and hadn't the state Attorney's office succeeded in bamboozling that August body into the belief that they had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter?
An anyhow, what was an aldermanic drag compared with that possessed by "Abe" Farris? No; Mr. Doarty, had you questioned him, would have assured you that he had not been born so recently as yesterday; that he was entirely dry behind the ears; and that if he "got" Mr. Farris at all he would get him good and plenty, for had he not only a week before, learning that Mr. Doarty was no longer in the good graces of his commanding officer, refused to acknowledge Mr. Doarty's right to certain little incidental emoluments upon which time-honored custom had placed the seal of lawful title?
In other words -- Mr. Doarty's words -- Abe Farris had not come across. Not only had he failed in this very necessary obligation, but he had added insult to injury by requesting Mr. Doarty to hie himself to the celestial nadir; and he had made his remarks in a loud, coarse tone of voice in the presence of a pock-marked barkeep who had it in for Mr. Doarty because of a certain sixty, weary, beerless days that the pock-marked one had spent at the Bridewell on Mr. Doarty's account.
But the most malign spleen becomes less virulent with age, and so it was that Mr. Doarty found his self-appointed task becoming irksome to a degree that threatened the stability of his Machiavellian resolve. Furthermore, he was becoming sleepy and thirsty.
"T' 'ell with 'im," sighed Mr. Doarty, sadly, as he removed his weight from the supporting pole to turn disconsolately toward the mouth of the alley.
At the third step he turned to cast a parting, venomous glance at the back of Farris's; but he took no fourth step toward the alley's mouth. Instead he dissolved, wraithlike, into the dense shadow between two barns, his eyes never leaving the back of the building that he had watched so assiduously and fruitlessly for the past several nights.
In the back of Farris's is a rickety fire escape -- a mute, decaying witness to the lack of pull under which some former landlord labored. Toward this was Mr. Doarty's gaze directed, for dimly discernible upon it was something that moved -- moved slowly and cautiously downward.
It required but a moment for Mr. Doarty's trained eye to transmit to his eager brain all that he required to know, for the moment at least, of the slow-moving shadow upon the shadowy ladder -- the he darted across the alley toward the yard in the rear of Farris's.
A girl was descending the fire escape. How frightened she was she alone knew and that there must have been something very dreadful to escape in the building above her was apparent from the risk she took at each step upon that loose and rusted fabric of sagging iron.
She was clothed in a flowered kimono, over which she had drawn a black silk underskirt. Around her shoulders was an old red shawl, and she was shod only in bedroom slippers. Scarcely a suitable attire for street wear; but then people in the vicinity of Twenty-Fourth Street are not over particular about such matters; especially those who elect to leave their bed and board at two of a morning by way of a back fire escape.
At the first floor the ladder ended -- a common and embarrassing habit of fire escape ladders, which are as likely as not to terminate twenty feet above a stone areaway, or a picket fence -- but the stand pipe continued on to the ground. A stand pipe, flat against a brick wall, is not an easy thing for a young lady in a flowered kimono and little else to negotiate; but this was an unusual young lady, and great indeed must have been the stress of circumstance which urged her on, for she came down the stand pipe with the ease of a cat, and at the bottom, turned, horrified, to look into the face of Mr. Doarty.
With a little gasp of bewilderment she attempted to dodge past him, but a huge paw of a hand reached out and grasped her shoulder.
"Well dearie?" said Mr. Doarty.
"Cut it out," replied the girl, "and le'me loose. Who are you anyhow?"
For answer Mr. Doarty pulled back the lapel of his coat disclosing a shiny piece of metal pinned on his suspender.
"I ain't done nothing," said the girl.
"Of course you ain't," agreed Mr. Doarty. "Don't I know that real ladies always climb down fire escapes at two o'clock in the morning just to prove that they ain't done nothin'?"
"Goin' to pinch me?"
"Depends," replied the plain-clothes man. "What's the idea of this nocturnal get-away."
The girl hesitated.
"Give it to me straight," admonished her captor. "It'll go easier with you."
"I guess I might as well," she said. "You see I get a swell offer from the Beverly Club, and that fat schonacker," she gave a vindictive nod of her head toward the back of Farris's resort, "he gets it tipped off to him some way, and has all my clothes locked up so as I can't get away."
"He wouldn't let you out of his place, eh?" asked Mr. Doarty, half to himself.
"He said I owed him three hundred dollars for board and clothes."
"An' he was keepin' you a prisoner there against your will?" purred Mr. Doarty.
"Yes," said the girl.
Mr. Doarty grinned. This wasn't exactly the magnitude of the method he had hoped to "get" Mr. Farris; but it was better than nothing. The present Grand Jury was even now tussling with the vice problem. Hours of its valuable time were being taken up by reformers who knew all about the general conditions with which every adult citizen is familiar; but the tangible cases, backed by the sort of evidence that convicts, were remarkable only on account of there scarcity.
Something seemed always to seal the mouths of the principal witnesses the moment they entered the Grand Jury room; but here was a case where personal spite and desire for revenge might combine to make an excellent witness against the most notorious dive keeper in the city. It was worth trying for.
"Come along," said Mr. Doarty.
"Aw, don't. Please don't!" begged the girl. "I ain't done nothing, honest!"
"Sure you ain't," replied Mr. Doarty. "I'm only goin' to have you held as a witness against Farris. That'll get you even with him, and give you a chance to get out and take that swell job at the Beverly Club."
"They wouldn't have me if I peached on Farris, and you know it. Why, I couldn't gt a job in a house in town if I done that."
"How would you like to be booked for manslaughter?" asked the plain clothes man.
"What you giving me!" laughed the girl. "Stow the kid."
"It ain't no kid," replied Mr. Doarty solemnly. "The police knows a lot about the guy that some one croaked up in Farris's in March, but we been layin' low for a certain person as is suspected of passin' him the drops. It gets tipped off to the inmates of Farris's, an' I bein' next, spots her as she is makin' her get-away. Are you hep?"
The young lady was hep -- most assuredly who would not be hep to the very palpable threat contained in Mr. Doarty's pretty little fiction?
"An'," continued Doarty, "when Farris finds you been tryin' to duck he won't do nothin' to help you."
The girl had known of many who had gone to the pen on slighter evidence than this. She knew that the police had been searching for some one upon whom to fasten the murder of a well known business man who had not been murdered at all, but who had had the lack of foresight to succumb to an attack of acute endocarditis in the hallway of the Farris place.
The searching eyes of the plain-clothes man had not failed to detect the little shudder of horror that had been the visible reaction in the girl to the sudden recollections induced by mention of that unpleasant affair, and while he had no reason whatever to suspect her or another of any criminal responsibility for the man's death, yet he made a mental note of the effect his words had had upon her.
Had she not been an inmate of the house at the time the thing occurred? And was it not just possible that an excellent police case might be worked up about her later if the exigencies of the service demanded a brilliant police *coup *to distract the public's attention from some more important case in which they had blundered?
For a moment the girl was silent. How badly he had frightened her with his threat Mr. Doarty had not the faintest conception, nor, could he have guessed the pitiable beating of her heart, would he have been able to conjecture the real cause of her alarm. That the policeman would assume criminal guilt in her should she allow her perturbation to become too apparent she well knew, and so, for the moment of her silence, she struggled to regain mastery of herself. Nor was she unsuccessful.
"It wouldn't get you anything," she said, "to follow that lay, for the report of the coroner's physician shows that Mr. -- that the man died of heart disease. But, cutting out all this foolishness, I'll swear a complaint against Farris if you want me to -- if you thing that it will get you anything. Though, and you can take it from me who knows, it's more likely to get you a prairie beat out Brighton way -- there's many a bull pullin' his box to-night out in the wilderness who thought that he could put one over on Abe Farris -- and Farris is still doin' business at the old stand."
As they talked they had been walking toward the street, and now Doarty crossed over to the corner with the girl and pulled for the wagon.
"What did it stand you to forget the guy's name? he asked, after they had stood in silence for a time awaiting the wagon's tardy arrival.
"They offered me a hundred," she replied.
"An', of course, you didn't take it," he ventured, grinning.
The girl made no response.
"The newspapers sure suffered an awful shock when they found the old bloke was one of the biggest stockholders in two State Street department stores," continued Mr. Doarty reminiscently.
"They say his family routed the advertising manager of every paper in the city out of bed at one o'clock in the morning, and that three morning papers had to pull out the story after they had gone to press with it, and stick in a column obituary tellin' all about what he had done for his city and his fellow man, with a cut of his mug in place of the front page cartoon -- gee! But it must be great to have a drag like that."
"Yes," said the girl in a faint voice.
Faintly in the distance a gong clanged.
"Them guys is sure takin' their time," observed Mr. Doarty.
A little crowd had gathered about the couple at the police-box, only mildly curious, for an arrest is no uncommon thing in that section of town; and when they discovered that no one had been cut up, or shot up, and that the prisoner was scandalously sober they ceased even to be mildly curious. By the time the wagon arrived the two were again alone.
At the station the girl signed a complaint against one Abe Farris, and was then locked up to insure her appearance in court the following morning.
Officer Doarty, warrant in hand, fairly burned the pavement back to Farris's. It had been many a month since he had made an arrest which gave him as sincere personal pleasure as this one. He routed Farris out of bed and hustled him into his clothes. This, he surmised, might be the sole satisfaction that he would derive, since the municipal court judge before whom the preliminary hearing would come later in the morning might, in all likelihood, discharge the defendant.
If the girl held out and proved a good witness there was a slight chance that Farris would be held to the Grand Jury, in which event he would derive a certain amount of unpleasant notoriety at a time when public opinion was aroused by the vice question, and the mayor in a most receptive mood for making political capital by revocation of a few saloon licenses.
All this would prove balm to Mr. Doarty's injured sensibilities.
Farris grumbled and threatened, but off to the station he went without even an opportunity to telephone for a bondsman. That he procured one an hour later was no fault of Mr. Doarty, who employed his most persuasive English in an endeavor to convince the sergeant that Mr. Farris should be locked up forthwith, and given no access to a telephone until daylight. But the sergeant had no particular grudge against Mr. Farris, while, on the other hand, he was possessed of a large family to whom his monthly pay check was an item of considerable importance. So to Mr. Farris, he was affable courtesy personified.
Thus it was that the defendant went free, while the injured one remained behind prison bars.
Farris's first act was to obtain permission to see the girl who had sworn to the complaint against him. As he approached her cell he assumed a jocular suavity that he was far from feeling.
"What you doin' here, Maggie?" he asked, by way of an opening.
"Ask Doarty."
"Didn't you know that you'd get the worst of it if you went to buckin' me?" queried Farris.
"I didn't want to do it," replied the girl; " though that's not sayin' that some one hadn't ought to do it to you good an' proper -- you got it comin' to you, all right."
"It won't get you nothin', Maggie."
"Maybe it'll get me my clothes -- that's all I want."
"Why didn't you say so in the first place, then, and not go stirrin' up a lot of hell this way?" asked Farris in an injured tone. "Ain't I always been on the square with you?"
"Sure! You been as straight as a corkscrew with me."
"Didn't I keep the bulls from guessin' that you was the only girl in the place that had any real reason for wantin' to croak old -- the old guy?" continued Mr. Farris, ignoring the reverse English on the girl's last statement.
A little shiver ran through the girl at mention of the tragedy that was still fresh in her memory -- her own life tragedy in which the death of the old man in the hallway at Farris's had been but a minor incident.
"What you goin' to tell the judge?" asked Farris after a moment's pause.
"The truth -- that you kept me there against my will by locking my clothes up where I couldn't get 'em," she replied.
"I was only kiddin -- you could 'a' had 'em any old time. Anyways, there wasn't no call for your doin' this."
"You got a funny way of kiddin'; but even at that, I didn't have any idea of peachin' on you -- he made me," said the girl.
"Who? Doarty?"
The girl nodded. "Sure -- who else? He's got it in for you."
Farris turned away much relieved, and an hour later a colored man delivered a package at the station for Maggie Lynch. It contained the girl's clothes, and an envelope in which were five germ-laden but perfectly good, ten-dollar bills.
The matron smiled as she opened the envelope.
"Some fox," she said.
"Some fox, is right," replied the girl.
THE Rev. Theodore Pursen sat at breakfast. With his right hand he dallied with iced cantaloup. The season was young for *cucumis melo*; but who would desire a lean shepherd for a fat flock? Certainly not the Rev. Theodore Pursen. A slender, well-manicured left hand supported an early edition of the "Monarch of the Mornings," a sheet which quite made up in volume of sound and in color for any lack of similarity in other respects to the lion of poetry and romance.On the table in his study were the two morning papers which the Rev. Pursen read and quoted in public -- the Monarch was for the privacy of his breakfast table.
Across from the divine sat his young assistant, who shared the far more than comfortable bachelor apartments of his superior.
The Rev. Pursen laid down the paper with a sigh.
"Ah me," he said.
His assistant looked up in polite interrogation.
"This is, indeed, an ungrateful world," continued Mr. Pursen, scooping a delicious mouthful from the melon's heart.
"Here is an interview with an assistant State attorney in which he mentions impractical reformers seeking free advertising and cheap notoriety. In view of the talk I had with him yesterday I cannot but believe that he refers directly to me
"It is a sad commentary upon the moral perspective of the type of rising young men of to-day, which this person so truly represents, that ulterior motives should be ascribed to every noble and unselfish act. To what, indeed, are we coming?"
"Yes," agreed the assistant, "whither are we drifting?"
"But was it not ever thus? Have not we of the cloth been ever martyrs to the cause of truth and righteousness?"
"Too true," sighed the assistant, "we have, indeed."
"Yet, on the other hand," continued Mr. Pursen, "there is an occasional note of encouragement that makes the fighting of the battle worth while."
"For example?" suggested the assistant.
Mr. Pursen turned again to the "Monarch of the Mornings."
"Here is a quarter of a column devoted to an interview with me on the result of my investigation of conditions in supposedly respectable residence districts. The article has been given much greater prominence than that accorded to the misleading statements of the assistant State attorney. I am sure that thousands of people in this great city are even this minute reading this noticeable heading -- let us hope that it will bear fruit, however much one may decry the unpleasant notoriety entailed."
Mr. Pursen held up the newspaper toward his assistant, who read, in type half an inch high:
PURSEN PILLORIES POLICE.
"The ointment surrounding the fly, as it were," suggested the assistant.
Mr. Pursen looked quickly at the young man, but discovering no sign of levity in his expression, handed the paper across the table to him and resumed his attack upon the cantaloup. A moment later the telephone-bell sounded from the extension at Mr. Pursen's elbow.
"Yes?" inquired Mr. Pursen.
"Hello. Dr. Pursen?"
"Yes."
"This is Doarty."
"Oh, yes; good morning, officer," greeted Mr. Pursen.
Mr. Doarty came right to the point. He knew when to beat about the bush and when not to.
"You been tryin' to close up Farris's place for six months; but you ain't never been able to get the goods on him. I got 'em for you, now."
"Good," exclaimed Mr. Pursen. " Tell me about it."
Mr. Doarty unburdened himself.
"The girl will be in court this morning to appear against Farris," he concluded. "You'd better get to her quick, before they do, and stick until she's called. She'll need bolstering."
"I'll come down right away," replied Mr Pursen. "Good-by, and thank you."
"And say," said Doarty, "you can give it out that you tipped me off to the whole thing -- I'd just as soon not appear in it any more than I can help."
"Just so," replied Mr. Pursen, and hung up the receiver.
As he turned back his assistant eyed him questioningly.
"My friend Mr. Doarty has started something which be is experiencing difficulty in terminating," guessed Mr. Pursen shrewdly.
At a quarter before ten the clergyman entered the court-room. He had no difficulty in locating the girl he sought, though the room was well filled with witnesses, friends, and relatives of the various prisoners who were to have their preliminary hearings, and the idle curious.
"I am the Rev. Mr. Pursen," he said with smiling lips as he took her hand.
The girl looked him squarely in the eyes.
"I come as a friend," continued Mr. Pursen. "I wish to help you. Tell me your story and we will see what can be done."
There were three young men with the clergyman. They had met him, by appointment, at the entrance to the courtroom. The girl eyed them.
"Reporters?" she asked.
"Representatives of the three largest papers," replied Mr. Pursen. "You will be quite famous by to-morrow morning," be added playfully.
When Mr. Pursen had introduced himself a great hope had sprung momentarily into the girl's heart -- a longing that three months at Farris's had all but stifled. Vain regrets seldom annoyed her now. She had attained a degree of stoicism that three months earlier would have seemed impossible; but with contact with one from that other world which circumstances had forbidden her ever again to hope to enter -- with the voicing of a kind word -- with the play of a smile that was neither carnal nor condescending came a sudden welling of the desire she had thought quite dead -- the desire to put behind her forever the life that she had been living.
For an instant a little girl had looked into the eyes of the Rev. Mr. Pursen, prepared to do and be whatever Mr. Pursen, out of the fulness of brotherly love, should counsel and guide her to do and be; but Mr. Pursen saw only a woman of the town, and to such were his words addressed with an argument which he imagined would appeal strongly to her kind. And it was a woman of the town who answered him with a hard laugh.
"Nothing doing," she said.
Mr. Pursen was surprised. He was pained. He had come to her as a friend in need. He had offered to help her, and she would not even confide in him.
"I had hoped that you might wish to lead a better life," he said, "and I came prepared to offer you every assistance in securing a position where you might earn a respectable living. I can find a home for you until such a position is forthcoming. Can you not see the horrors of the life you have chosen? Can you not realize the awful depths of degradation to which you have come, and the still blacker abyss that yawns before you if you continue along the downward path? Your beauty will fade quickly -- its lifeblood sapped by the gnawing canker of vice and shame, and then what will the world hold for you? Naught but a few horrible years of premature and hideous old age."
"And the way to start a new and better life," replied the girl in a level voice, "is to advertise my shame upon the front pages of three great daily newspapers -- that's your idea, eh?"
Mr. Pursen flushed, very faintly.
"You misunderstand me entirely," he said. "I abhor as much as any human being can the necessity which compels so much publicity in these matters; but it is for the greatest good of the greatest numbers that I labor -- that all of us should labor. If the public does not know of the terrible conditions which prevail under their very noses, how can we expect it to rouse itself and take action against these conditions?
"No great reform is ever accomplished except upon the clamorous demand of the people. The police -- in fact all city officials -- know of these conditions; but they will do nothing until they are forced to do it. Only the people who elect them and whose money pays them can force them. We must keep the horrors of the underworld constantly before the voters and tax-payers until they rise and demand that the festering sore in the very heart of their magnificent city be cured forever.
"What are my personal feelings, or yours, compared with the great good to the whole community that will result from the successful fruition of the hopes of those of us who are fighting this great battle against the devil and his minions? You should rather joyfully embrace this opportunity to cast off the bonds of hell, and by enlisting with the legion of righteousness atone for all your sinful past by a self-sacrificing act in the interest of your fellow man."
The girl laughed, a rather unpleasant, mirthless laugh.
"My 'fellow man'!" She mimicked the preacher's oratorical style. "It was my fellow man who made me what I am; it was my fellow man who has kept me so! it is my fellow man who wished me to blazon my degradation to the world as a price for aid."
As she spoke, the vernacular of the underworld with its coarse slang and vile English slipped from her speech like a shabby disguise that has been discarded, and she spoke again as she had spoken in her other life, before constant association with beasts and criminals had left their mark upon her speech as upon her mind and morals; but as the first flush of indignation passed she slipped again into the now accustomed rut.
"To hell with you and your fellow men," she said. " Now beat it."
Mr. Pursen's dignity bad suffered a most severe shock. He glanced at the three young men. They were grinning openly. He realized the humiliating stories they would write for their respective papers. Not at all the kind of stories he had been picturing to himself, in which the Rev. Mr. Pursen would shine as a noble Christian reformer laboring for the salvation of the sinner and the uplift of the community. They would make horrid jokes of the occurrence, and people would laugh at the Rev. Mr. Pursen.
A stinging rebuke was upon his lips. He would make this woman realize the great gulf that lay between the Rev. Mr. Pursen and such as she. He would let her see the loathing with which a good man viewed her and her kind; but as he opened his mouth to speak, his better judgment came to his rescue. The woman would doubtless make a scene -- her sort had a decided penchant for such things -- she might even resort to physical violence.
In either event the resultant newspaper stories would be decidedly worse than the most glaring exaggerations which the three young men might concoct from the present unfortunate occurrence.
So the Rev. Mr. Pursen stifled his true emotions, and with a sorrowful shake of his head turned sadly from his thankless task; and, indeed, why should a shepherd waste his valuable time upon a worthless sheep that preferred to stay astray? It was evident that he had lost sight entirely of the greater good that would follow the conviction of Farris, for he had not even mentioned the case to the girl or attempted to encourage her to make the most of this opportunity to bring the man to justice.
Farris's case was called shortly after the clergyman left the court-room. The man had an array of witnesses present to swear that the girl had remained in his house of her own volition -- that she could have left when she pleased; but the girl's story, coupled with the very evident fact that she was wholly indifferent as to the outcome of the case, resulted in the holding of Farris to the grand jury.
It was what the resort-keeper had anticipated, and as he was again released on bail he lost no time in seeking out the head of a certain great real-estate firm and laying before him a brief outline of the terrible wrong that was being contemplated against Mr. Farris, and, incidentally, against present real-estate rental values in the district where Mr. Farris held forth.
"You see," said Mr. Farris, "there ain't nothin' to this thing, anyway. It's just a case of the girl bein' sore on me because I had fired her, so she cooks up this story and gets me pinched. It's a shame, and me giving her a good home and a swell job when she didn't know nobody in the burg.
"It's too bad," and Mr. Farris heaved an oily sigh. "It's too damn bad when you think of what it'll mean to the property owners down there. Why, if the grand jury votes a true bill against me it'll start them fake reformers buzzin' around thick as flies in the whole district, and there won't be nothin' to it but a bunch of saloon licenses taken away by the mayor, and a string of houses closed up; and then where'll you be?
"Why, the best you can do for years 'll be to rent them places to furriners at six and eight dollars a month, and just look at the swell rents you're gettin' for 'em now. Yes, sir! Somethin's got to be done in the interests of property values down there, for after we go you couldn't get decent people to live in the neighborhood if you paid 'em, to say nothin' of gettin' rent from 'em -- why, they can't even use 'em for business purposes! Customers wouldn't dare come into the neighborhood for fear some one would see them, and straight girls wouldn't work in no such locality.
"If I was you I'd get busy. See your principals this mornin', and get 'em to put it up straight to the State attorney that it ain't in the interests of public morality to push this reform game no further. Why, look what it'll do -- close up the red-light district, an' you'll have them girls scattered all through the residence districts, wherever they can rent a little flat; maybe right next door to you an' your family. And then look at what that'll do to property everywhere. It won't be only the old levee values that 'll slump, but here and there through the residence districts North, South, and West them girls 'll get in and put whole blocks on the blink.
"Well, I guess you know as much about it as I do, anyway; so I'll blow along. I got to see my alderman, and if I had the front that you and your principals can put up I'd see " -- and here Mr. Farris leaned forward and whispered a name into the real-estate agent's ear. "He can put the kibosh on this whole reform game if he wants to; and take it from me, there ain't nobody that can't be made to want to do anything on earth if you can find the way to get 'em where they live," and Mr. Farris slapped his right-hand trouser-pocket until the coins therein rang merrily.
The real-estate agent pursed his lips and shook his head.
"You cannot reach that man in any such way as that," he said.
Mr. Farris, rising, laughed. "Oh splash," he said, and started for the door. "Well, do what you can at your end, and I'll work from the bottom up: and say, don't forget that if you sugar-coat it, the best of 'em will grab for it."
Then he went and had a talk with his alderman, who, in turn, saw some one else, who saw some one else, who saw another party; and the real-estate agent saw several of his principals, and at luncheon he talked with many of his colleagues, who hastened forthwith to confer with the big men whose property they handled.
In a day or two there began to filter into the State attorney's office by mail, by phone, and by personal call a continuous stream of requests that he move with extreme caution in the fight against vice which the reformers were urging him to initiate.
The arguments all were similar. They harped upon the danger of scattering the vicious element throughout the city -- they were pleas for the safety of the wives and daughters of the petitioners.
"Abolish the red light district," said one, "and the criminals and degenerates of the underworld will hunt our wives and daughters as the wolves of the North woods hunt their prey -- there will be no safety for them upon the streets nor within their own homes. Banish the women of the levee, and a state of anarchy and rapine will follow. For the sake of the good women of the city I pray that you will stand firm against the fallacious arguments of paid reformers and notoriety seekers."
No one mentioned property values -- the pill had been properly coated. The State attorney smiled. Mentally he had been roughly estimating the political influence of each petitioner. When an editorial appeared in one of the leading dailies under the caption, "Go Slow, Mr. State Attorney," in which all these arguments were rehashed and the suggestion made that another commission be appointed to investigate and recommend a solution of the vice problem, he laughed aloud, for did he not know that the uncles and aunts and sisters-in-law of that great paper owned nearly a third of the real estate in the segregated district?
But the State attorney knew that no man knew what would be the result of the adoption of the drastic suggestions of the reformers, so it was an easy matter for him to justify himself to himself when he waged his bitter war of words against vice, and gave private instructions to his assistants in the safety and seclusion of his own office -- instructions that did not always exactly harmonize with the noble sentiments enunciated in the typewritten "statements" passed out impartially to the representatives of the press for publication.
The State attorney was far from being a corrupt man; but the vice problem had been the plaything of reformers and politicians for years; it was as old as the sexes; it never had been solved, and the chances were that it never would be. If he had spoken his mind he would probably have admitted that he was afraid of it, entirely from sociological reasons, and apart from its political aspect.
But the State attorney was in no position to speak his true mind on many subjects -- he hoped, some day, to run for Governor.
And so it was that he called an assistant to his office and poured words of wisdom into his attentive ear.
"And what sort of a bunch have you got this month?" he concluded.
"Oh, just about as usual. A couple of bank presidents, some retired capitalists, several department managers, and one farmer. They're new now, but by the time that case reaches us they'll be tired of the grind and ready to jump through whenever I tell 'em to."
Thus spake the young assistant State attorney of the ancient and honorable grand jury.
TWO weeks had elapsed since Mr. Farris had been held for the grand jury. He had been at liberty on bail. The girl, against whom there had been no charge, had been held, virtually a prisoner, in a home for erring women that she might be available as a witness when needed.The grand jury was returning after lunch for the afternoon session. Something they had done the previous day had aroused the assistant State attorney's ire, so that he had felt justified in punishing their foolish temerity with two calls that day instead of one.
A little group had gathered in the front of the jury-room. They were discussing the cases passed, and speculating upon those to come. One and all were wearied with the monotony of the duty the State had imposed upon them.
"And the worst of it is," said one of the younger members of the panel, "it's all so utterly futile. When I was summoned as a grand juror I had a kind of feeling that the State had placed a great responsibility upon my shoulders, that she had honored me above other men, and placed me in a position where I might help to accomplish something really worth while for my fellow man."
One of the bank presidents laughed.
"And the reality you find to be quite different, eh?"
"Quite. I hear only one side of a great string of sordid, revolting stories, and I hear nothing more than the assistant State attorney wishes me to hear. There are momentous questions stirring the people of the city, but when we suggest that we should investigate the conditions underlying them we are told that we are not an investigating body -- that those questions are none of our business unless they are brought to our attention through the regular channel of the State attorney's office. We are told that the judge who charged us to investigate these very conditions had never charged a grand jury before, and while doubtless he meant well he didn't know what he was talking about."
"I understand," said another juror, "that we will get our chance at the vice problem to-day 'through the regular channel' -- the Abe Farris case is on the docket for this afternoon."
"And what will we do?" asked the young man. " We'll listen to answers to such questions as the assistant State attorney sees fit to ask, and if we start asking embarrassing questions he'll have the sergeant-at-arms hustle the witness out of the jury-room. Then we'll hem and haw, and end up by doing whatever the assistant State attorney wants us to do. We've done it on every important case -- you watch."
"You are quite right, sir," spoke up a retired capitalist. "In theory the grand jury system is the bulwark of our liberty -- it was, in fact, when it was instituted in the twelfth or thirteenth century, at a time when there were several hundred crimes punishable by death; but now that there are only two, murder and treason; it is a useless and wasteful relic of a dead past.
"The court that is competent to hold men to the grand jury is much more competent to indict them than is the grand jury itself. In fact, in cases where the punishment is less than death the court that now entertains the preliminary hearing might, to much better advantage to both the accused and public, pass sentence at once. It hears both sides, but all that it can do is discharge the prisoner or hold him for the grand jury. After this there is the expense of holding the prisoner in jail until his case comes to us, and then all the expensive paraphernalia of a grand jury is required to thresh over only one side of what has already been thoroughly heard before a trained and competent jurist. If we vote a true bill a third expensive trial is necessitated."
"Personally," said Ogden Secor, the foreman of the jury, "the whole thing strikes me as a farce. The grand jury, while not quite the tool of the State attorney's office, is considered by them a more or less harmless impediment to the transaction of the business of their office -- a burden to be borne, but lightened in the most expeditious manner.
"I, as foreman, am a dummy; the secretary is a dummy; the sergeant-at-arms is a dummy. We look to the assistant State attorney for direction in our every move. We come from businesses in which we have never, in all probability, come in contact with criminal law, and we are expected to grasp the machinery of our new duties on a moment's notice.
"Were it purely a matter of justice to be dispensed, I have no doubt but that we might do quite as well as any court; but we are up against a very different thing from justice -- at every hand we are trammeled by law."
The assistant State attorney entered the room.
"Sorry to have been late, gentlemen," he said. "Call the next case, Mr. Sergeant-at-arms," and the routine of the jury-room commenced half an hour after the appointed time, although a quorum of the grand jury had been present for thirty-five minutes.
The last case of the afternoon call was that against Abe Farris. There were only two witnesses -- Officer Doarty and the girl, Maggie Lynch. Doarty had suffered a remarkable change of heart since the evening he stood in the alley back of Farris's. He was chastened in spirit. His recollection of the affair was vague. After the assistant State attorney had ceased questioning him several of the jurors asked additional information.
"What sort of person is the complaining witness, officer?" asked the banker.
Mr. Doarty looked about and grinned sheepishly. He would not have been at a loss for a word to describe her had a fellow policeman asked him this question, but this august body of dignified business men seemed to call for a special brand of denatured diction in the description of a spade.
"Oh," he said finally, "she's just like the rest of 'em down there -- she's on the town."
"Would you believe her story?" asked the banker.
Doarty grinned and shrugged. "Hard to say," he replied.
"In your opinion, officer," asked the assistant State attorney, "have you any case against Farris? Could we get a conviction?"
"No, I don't think you could," answered the policeman. It was the question he had been awaiting.
"That's all, officer," said the assistant State attorney. "Just a moment, Mr. Sergeant-at-arms, before you call another witness."
"A moment, please, officer; I want to ask another question before you go," spoke up one of the jurymen.
The assistant State attorney sighed and looked bored. He had found this the most effective means of silencing jurymen.
"As I understand it, you worked this case up, am I right?" asked the juryman.
"Yes, sir."
"If you had enough evidence three weeks ago to warrant the arrest of Farris, why haven't you got enough now to insure conviction?"
Doarty looked uncomfortable. He fingered his cap, and turned an appealing look toward the assistant State attorney. That functionary came to his rescue.
"You see, Mr. -- a -- Smith, pardon me for interrupting," he said, "the girl swore out a warrant, and it was necessary to make the arrest. That's all, officer, you may go now."
"But," insisted Mr. Smith, "it was quite apparent from the newspaper account at the time that the girl was an unwilling complainant -- that the police officer worked up the case."
In the mean time, Doarty, only too anxious to do so, had left the grand jury-room. The sergeant-at-arms stood with his hand upon the knob of the door looking questioningly at the assistant State attorney.
"You do not care to question any other witnesses, do you?" asked that young gentleman of the jury.
"What other witnesses are there?" asked Mr. Smith.
"Only the girl," replied the assistant State attorney; "but you can see from the officer's testimony that it is scarcely worth our while to hear from the girl. You might as well take a vote, Mr. Foreman," he concluded, turning toward Ogden Secor.
"All those in favor of a true bill raise their right hands," commanded Mr. Secor.
"Just a moment, Mr. Foreman," interrupted Mr. Smith.
The assistant State attorney scowled and sighed, then settled back in his chair in martyrlike resignation. Mr. Smith was a thorn in the flesh.
"It seems to me, Mr. Foreman," said Mr. Smith, "that until we have heard all the witnesses we are in no position to vote intelligently. I, for one, am in favor of calling in the girl."
"Yes," " Yes," came from several of the jurors.
The sergeant-at-arms looked toward the assistant State attorney for authority.
"Call the next witness," said Ogden Secor.
The sergeant-at-arms was surprised to receive a command from the foreman of the jury, but the assistant State attorney made no demur, so he opened the door.
"Next witness!" he called, and the grand jury clerk, whose office is just outside the grand jury-room, beckoned to a girl who sat in a chair in the far corner shielding her face with her arm from the glaring eyes of two press cameras. As she rose two flashlights exploded simultaneously. Then she hurried across the room and passed through the doorway into the presence of the grand jury.
Ogden Secor had had not the faintest curiosity regarding her. From earliest boyhood he had learned to shudder at the very thought of the hideous, painted creatures who plied their sickening vocation in a part of the town to which neither business, accident, nor inclination, had ever led him. For a city-bred man whose boyhood had been surrounded with every luxury and whose spending allowance had been practically unlimited, he was remarkably clean. His high ideals were still unsullied, and though a man's man mentally and physically, morally he was almost a prude.
It was with difficulty that he raised his eyes to the girl's face as he administered the oath, and it was with a distinct shock of surprised incredulity that he saw that she was neither painted nor hideous. Her brown eyes fell the moment that they met his -- there was no slightest sign of boldness in them, and when she turned to face the jury as the assistant State attorney began questioning her her attitude was merely of quiet self-possession.
The young foreman could not reconcile the refinement of her appearance and the well-modulated voice with his preconceived ideas concerning her kind. He had been prepared for a sort of coarse, animal beauty, perhaps, and he had fully expected gaudy apparel and quantities of cheap jewelry; but instead he saw a demure, quietly dressed girl who might have stepped fresh from a convent. It was appalling to think that she had been an inmate of Farris's.
As she answered the often brutal questions of the assistant State attorney Ogden Secor watched her profile. He saw that the girl was actually suffering under the ordeal; and he had thought that she would welcome the notoriety and brazenly flaunt her shame in the faces of the jurymen!
And he saw, too, as he studied her face, that she was not merely ordinarily good-looking -- hers was a face that would have been commented upon anywhere as exceptionally beautiful. He could not believe that the girl before him had voluntarily chosen the career she had been following.
The assistant State attorney had finished questioning her. He had brought out only the simple story she had told Doarty the night he had discovered her upon the fire-escape. It had not been a part of his plan to bring out much of anything bearing on the case. When he had finished Mr. Smith arose.
"How did you happen to be at Farris's place at all?" he asked. " Did you go there of your own volition?"
"Yes," replied the girl.
"You knew the life that you would have to lead there?"
" No; I did not know what kind of place it was."
"Tell us how you came there then," said Mr. Smith.
"I would rather not," she replied. "It has no bearing upon this case."
"Would you go back there if Farris would take you?" asked another jury-man.
"He will not take me."
"What do you intend doing?"
"I shall have to go to some other city where I am not known."
"And there you will continue the -- ah -- the same vocation?"
"What else is there for me?" she asked.
"There are many good men who would help you," said Mr. Smith. She shrugged, and for the first time Secor caught a note of hardness in her voice as she replied.
"There are no good men," she said.
There was a finality to her statement that put an end to further questioning.
"THAT is all," said the assistant State attorney with a wave toward the door. The girl stepped down from the witness-stand. As she passed him a sudden impulse prompted Ogden Secor to stop her. He could not have explained why he did so, but before he realized it he had asked the girl to wait in the witness-room without until he came.A great and sudden pity for her had welled within him at her last words: *"There are no good men."* To have spoken to such a woman as she would have seemed an utter impossibility to Ogden Secor a brief half-hour before, and now he had asked her to wait for him, and in his mind was a determination to help her -- to save her from the hideous life she had chosen.
Immediately after he had spoken the words he regretted them. It was as though he had bound himself to personal contact with a leper. He paled a little at the thought of the ordeal which faced him; but he would go through with it, as to that he was determined, and if he could help the girl to a better life he would do so. Had he guessed the interpretation the girl put upon his request to speak with her outside the jury-room he would have flushed rather than paled. To her all men were hunters -- all women quarry.
The jurors were discussing the wisdom of voting a true bill. All seemed to harbor not the slightest doubt that the girl had been held against her will in Farris's place. Had the vote been taken without discussion a true bill would have been the unanimous result; but with the discussion came the inevitable recourse to the superior legal judgment of the assistant State attorney.
"It is up to you, gentlemen," he said, when one of the jurymen asked his opinion. "I do not wish to influence you in any way. I am merely here to help you; but inasmuch as you ask, I might say, for your information, that this case is identical with many others we have handled during this session of the grand jury. The police advise us that there is insufficient evidence to convict.
"If we vote a true bill the taxpayers will be compelled to pay for an expensive trial, at the end of which the defendant will be discharged, and that will be the end of it; while should we vote a no-bill the case may again be brought before the grand jury should the police at any time in the future unearth further evidence.
"Remember, gentlemen, if you vote a true bill now, this case can never again come before the grand jury, and in my humble opinion you will be virtually playing into Farris's hands and insuring him immunity. It is up to you."
The foreman took the vote. A majority favored no bill, and that was the end of that particular case of the People *vs.* Abe Farris. Property interests throughout the city had been protected and real-estate values remained unchanged.
It was the last case on call for that day, and as the jurors hurried out to attend to their neglected businesses Ogden Secor found himself tarrying at his desk in the hope that there might be none present to witness his interview with the girl from Farris's. There was also a growing hope that the girl herself would tire of waiting and depart before he left the jury-room.
The others had gone before he emerged, and it was with a feeling of relief that he realized that this was true, for as he passed through the doorway he saw the trim figure of a young girl sitting in the far corner of the outer room. Her eyes were on the doorway leading to the grand jury room, and as Secor came out she rose and stood waiting him.
He came directly toward her, and as his eyes rested upon her face he ceased to regret that he had asked her to wait. Surely there could be no intentional evil in the owner of such a face. He was confident that it would be an easy matter to guide her into a decent life. As he reached her he found that it was to be rather an embarrassing conversation to open. For a moment he hesitated. It was the girl who first spoke.
"What do you wish of me?" she asked, although she was quite sure that she knew precisely what he wished. While she had waited for him she had quite fully determined her course of action. She was convinced that the "swell job at the Beverly Club " would not be for her, even though the grand jury failed to indict Farris.
A thousand times during the past bitter months she had thrashed out the problem of her life; a thousand times she had determined to seek other employment when she could leave Farris's; and a thousand times she had realized that her life was already ruined past redemption, and that never again could she live among decent people with the constant fear hanging over her that the horrible secret of her past might at any moment be discovered. Better, far better, she thought, to continue in that life until death released her.
But here, she felt, was to be an easier way for a few years at least. Sooner or later this man would tire of her, but in the mean time she would have a good living -- it would be much better than either Farris's or the Beverly Club. Possibly she could save enough money to insure the balance of her life against want. She had heard of women like herself who had done this very thing. And so she waited now for the proposal which she was confident Mr. Ogden Secor was about to make.
She knew nothing about this young man -- not even his name -- nor did she care more about him than to know that he had ample funds with which to defray the cost of an expensive plaything.
"Miss Lynch," said Ogden Secor, "I find the things I wanted to say to you most difficult to say. I scarcely know how to commence. I should hate to offend you."
"No chance," she replied. "You know what I am. There is your answer. Go ahead -- get the proposition out of your system."
Though her words were light, she was a trifle nonplused at his method of approach. There was a distinct note of deference in his voice that she had long been unused to from men. Could it be possible that she was mistaken in his intentions? But what else under the sun could he want of her?
"You See," continued Mr. Secor, "I couldn't help but know something of your life from your testimony in there; yet, even though I heard it from your own lips, I find it difficult to believe that it is true -- it doesn't seem possible that you could prefer such a life; and I wanted to ask if I might not be of service to you in some way to help you to live differently."
The girl noted the clean, strong face of the young man before her, the clear eyes, and healthy skin. There was no indication of dissipation or evil habits. She had not spoken to such a man since she came to the city -- she had not believed that any clean men lived in the city that she so loathed. She was still inclined, however, to be a trifle skeptical; yet she gave him the benefit of the doubt in her reply.
"I am afraid that it is too late," she said.
"It is never too late," he replied.
"You would not say that if you knew what my early training had been. I was taught to believe that God expected but two things of a woman -- to be virtuous, and to become a wife and mother. If she were not virtuous, the second thing became a crime in her -- for a woman such as I to marry and bear children were a crime a thousand times more hideous than loss of virtue.
"There was no place on earth for such as I, and no hell of sufficient horror in the hereafter. As far as this life or the next is concerned, I am absolutely and irrevocably lost. I appreciate your kind intentions, but I fear there is nothing to be done."
The girl's words brought Secor up with a sudden and most unpleasant jolt, for he realized that the thing she had said voiced precisely his own views in the matter, or rather what had been his lifelong views up to a few moments before. For the first time in his life he felt that there was something rather unfair, inhuman, and cruel in the sentence that the world passed on its unfortunate sisters.
"I know precisely how you feel," he said at length, making no attempt to lighten the gravity of her sin, "for I, too, have been taught to believe that same thing: but now that I come to deal with a specific case I find that the old theory was of value only in the abstract -- it isn't human, and it isn't good sense. There is no reason why you shouldn't lead a decent life if you wish to.
"In fact, that you haven't recently done so is all the more reason that you should commence now. It can't make things any better if you go on as you have been, but as far as you yourself are concerned and those you come in contact with it will be very much better indeed if you live as you should live during the balance of your life."
"Why do you want to help me?" asked the girl suddenly. She had discovered that she had quite unexpectedly lost sight of the motives which she believed had prompted the young man to seek this interview. There had been nothing either in his words or manner to support her suspicions; yet, with her knowledge of men, it was difficult for her to dismiss them.
Secor hesitated a moment before replying, a half smile upon his lips,
"That is a difficult question," he said. "I never did anything of the sort before, and I don't know why I have attempted it now. If I tried to explain the psychology of it I should appear ridiculous, I fear."
"I should like to know," said the girl, "if for no other reason than to learn that I had made a good guess as to what you wanted." She had determined to prove her point for her own satisfaction.
"And what did you think was my reason?" asked Secor.
She looked him straight in the eyes, and without a smile said quite simply:
" To make a date with me."
To say that young Mr. Secor was shocked would have been to put it too mildly by far; but his expression gave no hint of the disappointment and disgust that surged through him.
"And if that were my reason," he asked, "would you have accepted my -- ah -- invitation?"
"Why not?" And she was about to add, "Isn't your money as good as anybody's?" But she found herself faltering in her suspicion of this young man, and a sudden sense of shame sent the red blood mantling to her cheek.
For a moment he stood looking straight into her eyes until hers dropped suddenly in confusion.
"I am sorry," he said, "that you should have misconstrued my intentions." His voice held a faint note of sadness and not a little of disappointment. "But as you have, I shall try to give you my real reasons at the risk of appearing silly."
"I wish you would," she said. "I didn't want to think the other, but af ter my experience with men, it was hard to believe that one of them could go out of his way to perform an unselfish act where a woman was concerned -- a woman such as I," she added in a very faint whisper.
"I wanted to help you," said Secor from the moment that I saw your face and heard your voice in the jury-room. I couldn't believe that a girl like you belonged in the underworld. It was not because of the fact that you are a very beautiful girl, but that your face and expression reflect a sweetness of character that seemed entirely out of place in the life you have been leading. There must have been a sudden, subconscious appeal to the protective instinct that is supposed to have been very strong in primitive man -- in no other way can I account for the immediate desire I had to save you. Those are my reasons, if you can call them reasons, for asking you to wait here for me. You will doubtless find them as ridiculous as they now seem to me."
The girl's lips trembled as she attempted to speak, and tears came to her eyes so that she had to turn away to hide her emotion. It had been long indeed since a man had spoken to her and of her in this way. Her whole heart went out to this stranger because of those few kindly words -- such words as her poor soul had been starving for the want of during the long, hard months of her living death.
"What do you wish me to do?" she asked after she had regained control of her voice.
"Let me help you find employment -- that is all that you may accept from any man. It is all that any decent man should offer you," he replied.
"I will do whatever you wish," she said simply.
"I am going away to-morrow," he went on, "to be gone for several weeks. In the mean time I'll give you the name and address of a man who can and will help you to at least temporary employment. Keep in touch with him and when I return we'll see what is best to be done, and what sort of work you are best qualified for."
As he spoke he bad written a name and address upon a leaf of his memorandum-book. He tore the sheet out and handed it to her. Without looking at it she slipped it into her hand-bag.
"And now good-by and good luck," he said, extending his hand to her.
"You must not shake hands with a -- with me," she said.
"Don't say that," he replied. "Forget what you have been -- you are that no longer. I am wanting to shake hands with an entirely new girl, and to prove that you intend to be a new girl you must let me."
He smiled the clean, wholesome smile that made his strong young face doubly attractive. There was no refusing Ogden Secor anything that he asked when he smiled, and so the girl placed her hand in his.
"This is the ratification of your pledge," he said. "I shall never doubt for a moment that you are keeping it. Until I return, then," and bowing he left her there, a new hope and a great happiness in her heart.
If one good man could forgive her her past, there must be others. Possibly the world would not be so hard upon her after all. Maybe there was a chance for her to live as she wanted to live, and to find the happiness that she had so craved, and which she had thought was lost forever.
Suddenly she recalled that she did not know the name of the man who had just left her. Well, that could easily be ascertained. She had the name and address of his friend. She would go to him at once and take any employment that he could find for her. She would work for a bare living, if necessary, rather than go back to the old life. She would do anything for the man who had spoken to her as this young stranger had spoken.
Eagerly she opened her hand-bag and withdrew the little slip of paper. As she read the name a cold wave of disappointment and bitterness chilled and blighted the new happiness and hope that had filled her being.
The name on the paper was "Rev. Theodore Pursen."
IT was a very disheartened girl who found her way out of the criminal court building and across the Dearborn Street Bridge to the Loop. She was wondering if her new friend were of the same type of reformer as the Rev. Mr. Pursen. Would he want her to narrate the story of her rescue for the Sunday editions upon his return?Then it occurred to her that she would not see him when he came back to the city, for she had no idea who he might be, and she certainly would not go to the Rev. Mr. Pursen to find out. It began to look as though she had made a false start after all on her road to a new life.
At Lake and Dearborn she stopped to purchase an evening paper, and in the entrance to a near-by building she sought among the want ads for a likely boarding-house. She found an address far out on the South Side, and a moment later boarded a Cottage Grove Avenue car at Wabash Avenue.
As she rode South she tried to reach some definite decision as to her future. She could go back to the old life, and the young man would never know. The chances are that he would not care if he did know.
His act had been prompted by but the passing kindness of a moment. If he ever thought of her again, it would be but to inquire of his friend the Rev. Mr. Pursen if she had applied to him for aid, and finding that she had not, he would promptly forget all about the incident.
As she speculated upon her future, her eyes wandered aimlessly over the printed page of close-set want ads in the paper in her hand.
Presently a notice caught her attention:
WANTED -- Neat girl for general office work; small wages to start; experience unnecessary. Apply Kesner Building.
" Why not try it?" she thought. "He'll never know, of course, but he was on the square. He wanted to help me, and I can't believe that he is like Pursen. He wanted to give me a chance to be the kind of girl he thought I looked like, and why shouldn't I be? I can do that much, surely, when all my inclinations lie in that direction. I haven't wanted to be bad, God knows; and I guess I've been a fool to think that I had to keep on that way just because I had started."
At Twenty-Fourth Street a pimply-faced young man boarded the car. As he walked forward toward the front platform, a lighted cigarette in his nicotin-stained fingers, be turned to stare into the face of every woman in the car. When he came opposite the girl from Farris's he stopped with a broad grin upon his unclean face.
"Why, hello there, Mag! " he cried. "When did you get out?" And with the words he plumped into the seat at her side.
"This afternoon, Eddie," she replied quietly.
"Where to now?" he asked.
"I'm on my way uptown to find a boarding-place."
"Got a new job already?" he asked, surprised.
"I'm cuttin' that out, Eddie," she said. "I'm goin' to be on the square after this."
"Forget it," he grinned.
"On the dead."
"Who's keepin' you?" he persisted.
"Myself."
"May Beverley asked me to look you up," he remarked. "She says you promised to come there."
"I didn't think she'd want me after that Farris business," replied the girl.
The young man laughed.
"Huh! What does she care? She ain't got no love for Farris, and besides a chicken with an angel face like yours can get in anywhere in the burg. But on the dead, Mag, you're a boob not to get your hooks onto some rich gazimbat. I know a gink right now that'll pass me out five hundred bones any time for a squab like you. Say the word and I'll split with you."
The girl looked at the man for a moment, and then turned and gazed out of the window.
"That's right; think it over," said Eddie. "It's a good proposition and that ain't no dream. He's not exactly pretty, but he's there with a bundle of kale that would choke the Panama. He'd set you up in a swell apartment, plaster sparklers all over you, and give you a year-after-next model eight-lunger and a shuffer. You'd be the only cheese on Mich. Boul."
The girl knew that Eddie was not romancing; and here she had been thinking that she could not even get into the Beverley Club. Here was easy money -- riches even -- just for the taking; and she would be no worse for it than she already was.
She looked again at the man beside her, and as she looked she found herself comparing him with the young man she had last talked with. He, too, had come to her with an offer. She glanced at the want ad lying face-up in the paper on her lap.
"Five dollars a week," she mused. "Six at the most."
"What's that?" asked Eddie. "I didn't getcha."
Eddie was smiling at her. She saw his smile, but beyond it she saw the smile of that other young man. Eddie would have felt pained could he have read the unvoiced comparison that shot into the girl's mind as she looked at Eddie's yellow-toothed, unwholesome smirk.
"Well?" asked Eddie at last. "Shall I frame up a date?"
"No," said the girl, "I think I've got a swell job already. Good-by, Eddie; here's where I get off."
She found the boarding-house, and after paying a week's board in advance returned to the Loop, seeking the Kesner Building. On the eighteenth floor she found the room number given in the want ad.
"There have been fifteen other applicants already," said the man to whom she had been directed by a typist near the door of the office; "but I haven't decided on any one in particular yet -- there'll be as many more in to-morrow morning. Have you had any experience?"
"No; the advertisement said that was unnecessary," she replied.
"Yes, of course; but with so many applicants I would naturally prefer to choose an experienced girl. What have you been doing?"
The girl hesitated.
"Nothing." she said finally; "I have just come from the country."
"What is your name?"
"Lathrop -- June Lathrop," she answered, giving him her true name; for with her decision to commence life anew she had also decided to do so under her true colors. There would be nothing in her future, she had determined, that could bring odium upon her father's name.
"Well Miss Lathrop," said he, "to be frank, you're the most likely looking of the applicants so far. Most of them have had experience, but that doesn't count much against natural intelligence, and unless I'm way off you've got that. I'll tell you what, you come back here tomorrow morning about nine-thirty, and if no one I like better has shown up by that time the job's yours. Good afternoon."
For three months June Lathrop folded and enclosed circulars on the eighteenth floor of the Kesner Building at the princely salary of six dollars a week. As her board and room at the place she had first selected cost her seven dollars a week, it required but a rudimentary knowledge of higher mathematics to convince her that she would either have to change positions or boarding-houses. She chose the latter alternative.
The change brought her into a neighborhood perilously close to the red-light district. Several times she saw women she had known in that other life. They passed her upon the street, clothed in clinging silk and starred with many a scintillating gem. June was careful to see that they did not have a chance to recognize her.
Her clothes were becoming a trifle shabby; but they were neat, and were worn with that indefinable air that some women can impart to rags.
Not once yet had she regretted the step she had taken. For the first time in months she felt a growing interest in life and a quiet contentment that was almost happiness -- as near to happiness at least as she ever expected to attain.
She often smiled sadly to herself in recalling upon how slight a thing the turning in her life had hinged -- the clean smile and kindly interest of a stranger, a man whose name, even, she did not know.
Early in her career upon the eighteenth floor of the Kesner Building June had discovered that the road to higher wages paralleled the acquirement of special training. Any one could fold and enclose circulars. There were always thousands of young girls to be employed at a moments notice for this class of work; but even here, she discovered, expertness demanded and received the highest wages. So she made it a point to become expert.
At the end of the second month she could handle a greater volume of work in a day than any other girl in the department, and with a lower percentage of errors. Her wages were advanced to seven dollars, and she was entrusted with the more important work of the department.
In the same room with her were several typists and on the floor below many stenographers. June discovered that the poorest paid typist earned a dollar a week more than she -- or at least received that much more.
She determined to become a typist, and with that end in view practised during the noon hour each day under the guidance of one of the regular typists. From her she learned that some of the stenographers down-stairs received as much as seventy-five dollars a month -- almost three times her wage!
That evening June enrolled in a night-school where she could study stenography. The venture necessitated a curtailment of expenses -- it meant walking to and from her work and finding a still cheaper room than that she had. Her new lodgings were nearer the Loop. Here she had a tiny gas-stove, where she cooked her slender meals -- two a day, some days.
At night she practised and studied. In a month she could take ordinary dictation and transcribe ninety per cent of it quite as it had been dictated. Without being aware of it she had become some forty per cent more efficient than most stenographers ever become; yet she felt that she was far from the proficiency required to obtain or hold a position.
Then the blow fell. Her careful attention to her work, in the circularizing department -- her expertness -- lost her position for her. It happens every day in the departments of big businesses in every city. A slack season came. Expenses must be curtailed. The head of the house conferred with the manager of her department. The pay-roll was the first item to be considered in reducing expenses -- it always is. Likewise it was the last thing.
"How many girls can you spare at this season of the year, Mr. Brown?" asked the head of the house.
"We can cut the force in two," replied Mr. Brown, not because he thought so, but because he thought the head of the house would like to have him say it. Mr. Brown had been up against this same thing twice a year since he had assumed the management of the department. He had found it far easier to coincide with the wishes of his superior, especially when the hysteria of retrenchment was abroad; later he could employ other girls to bring his department up to a respectable working basis -- after the head of the house had transferred his attention and hysteria to another department or another field of endeavor.
The head of the house glanced down the pay-roll, a copy of which Mr. Brown had handed him.
"H-m!" he said. "Seven dollars! Seven dollars is too much for this class of work, Mr. Brown. When I started this business I had but one employee -- a girl. She and I did all the work. I used to work eighteen and twenty hours a day, and if I had made seven dollars a week clear the first year I should have been delighted. She worked nearly every night and Saturday afternoons as well, and did it for three dollars a week. You are paying your help altogether too much. I see you have three girls in this department who are receiving seven dollars a week -- we will start with them."
And he made three little x's -- one before the name of each of the three. So June lost her job. When Mr. Brown told her that he would not need her after the following Saturday she was dumfounded.
"Hasn't my work been satisfactory?" she asked.
"Yes," replied Mr. Brown; and then as well as he could he explained the necessity for cutting down the force: but just why it was necessary to lay off his most efficient help he did not attempt to explain.
That night and for many days thereafter June scanned the want columns of the papers. She wrote in reply to blind ads -- letters that never received a response. She called in answer to those that gave an address, but there was always something they wanted that she lacked.
Quite often the positions were filled before she applied, and then she discovered that she must wait upon the corner near the office of the afternoon newspaper from which she obtained her leads, seize one of the first copies that came onto the street, and hasten to the addresses of the more likely appearing ads if she would be in time to obtain a first hearing.
In this way she managed, during the ensuing three or four months to pick up half a dozen temporary positions at wages ranging from five to nine dollars a week, but fully half the time she was idle. She had been compelled to give up night-school, but she still practised stenography at home; and her afternoons, when she was out of employment, she spent at the employment bureaus of various typewriter companies gaining speed on machines of different makes.
She had not sufficient confidence as yet to apply for a position as typist -- she was too inexperienced to know that this is the sole asset of the majority of typists.
Four months after she lost her position in the Kesner Building she was working in the bindery department of a small job printing establishment at four dollars a week. Her clothes were by this time far too shabby for her to hope to obtain an office position; nor was there any immediate likelihood that she would be able to save sufficient money from her wages ever to purchase other clothing. But even now she retained her courage, though hope was rapidly succumbing.
Poor and insufficient food had left its mark upon her pallid, emaciated cheeks and dark-ringed eyes. She had made no friends among her coworkers. The good girls she avoided from a sense of shame in her past; the others, with their cheap immoralities, disgusted her. She would be one thing or the other -- all good or all bad -- and so she could not abide those who sailed under false colors, assuming a respectability that they did not have.
She still retained sufficient beauty to make her noticeable among other girls. It was her sole possession of value. One day she had an opportunity to cash it. The man who ran the print-shop often walked through the bindery inspecting the work. On several occasions he stopped and spoke to June about the job that she happened to be engaged upon. He was a middle-aged man, rather good-looking. There was little or no indication of dissipation upon his face, and yet June knew that he was a hunter -- she had heard snatches of conversation among the other girls; conversation that made her blush, hardened as she thought she was.
One afternoon the forewoman told her that "the boss" wanted to see her in his office. She hastened to respond to the summons.
Her employer smiled pleasantly as she entered.
"Sit down," he said, indicating a chair beside his desk.
June did as he bid.
"How long have you been with us?" he asked.
"Two weeks," she replied.
"I have been noticing your work -- and you," said the man. "I think that you are not getting enough wages. I believe that we can fix it up so that you can earn ten dollars a week -- how would that strike you?"
The girl's eyes narrowed, but the man did not notice.
"I should be glad if I could earn ten dollars a week," she replied.
"Well, suppose you take dinner with me to-night and we'll talk it over -- I'm too busy just now. Well, what do you say?"
June looked him straight in the eyes, and then she laughed. She thought of the apartment on Michigan Avenue, the eight-cylinder touring-car, the chauffeur, the diamonds -- of all that she had refused seven months ago.
"You poor boob," she said. "You poor, cheap boob, you!"
The man turned scarlet. He tried to say something, but the words stuck in his throat.
June rose from her chair.
"Give me my time, please. I've heard that there were men like you. Before I went to work I thought they were all like you; but in all the offices I have worked -- and I've worked in a lot of them -- you're the first man that ever made a raw crack like that to me. If you had had the nerve to come right out and say what you wanted of me I might at least have had a little respect for you; but to try to work that rotten old cradle-robbing dinner-game on me! And offering me ten dollars a week and work all day in the bindery to boot! Give me my four dollars and let me get out of here!"
For two weeks June sought another position in vain. Her money was gone, and she owed for a week's room rent. She had no food or prospects of food. She had not eaten for twenty-four hours; and then, as fate would have it, she met Eddie on the street -- Eddie of the pimply face, the unclean nails, and the stained fingers.
"For the love o' Mike!" exclaimed Eddie. "You?"
"Surest thing you know, Eddie," replied the girl, laughing.
"The swellest-lookin' chicken on the line -- in rags!" he said. "What's the idea, Mag? Got a job as one of them new she-cops and doin' a little gum-shoe work in disguise?"
"No, Eddie; I'm out of a job."
Sudden enlightenment dawned upon Eddie's countenance.
"Bein' on the square hasn't got you much, eh?"
"No, Eddie; it hasn't got me anything except an awful appetite and nothing to satisfy it with."
The young man looked into her face searchingly.
"You hungry, Mag!"
She didn't deny it.
He grasped her by the arm.
"You come along with me," he commanded. "I know a joint round the corner where we can feed up swell on four bits, and that's all I got just now."
The girl drew back.
"No, Eddie," she said; "I can't sponge."
"Forget it," he cried. "Do you suppose I'll see an old pal hungry when I got the price? Not me!"
And then, as she still demurred, his expression changed.
"Oh." he said, "I forgot. You're on the square now, so you'd be ashamed to be seen with a dip like me -- that's it. Well, I don't know but you're right. You can't be too careful."
"That's not it, Eddie, and you know it," she cried. "But I've been trying so hard to make good! I haven't asked anybody for help, and I've been on the square all the time. I hate to have to fall back on charity now."
"Charity nothin'!" he exploded. "You'd do as much for me if I was down and out. Come along now, and when you get the price you can feed me up in return if you feel that way about it."
And so they went together to the joint around the corner where they could get a swell feed for two for fifty cents.
"What do you think of this virtue lay by this time?" asked Eddie after they had partially satisfied the cravings of the inner man and woman.
"I guess it's its own reward all right enough," replied the girl.
Eddie was silent for a moment.
"Do you remember me tellin' you about an old bloke the last time I seen you?" he asked presently.
"Yes."
"That proposition's still open."
She reached across the table and laid her hand upon his stained fingers.
"Don't, Eddie," she said. "I'm trying hard to fight the temptation to go back where there is plenty of easy money, and good clothes, and enough to eat. I want to be on the square, though, Eddie, so don't make it harder for me."
He patted her hand.
"You're the real goods, Mag," he said. I thought you was just four-flushin' that time you told me you'd quit the gay life, but I guess it takes more'n a four-flush for a girl like you to wear them clothes and starve to boot just for the sake of bein' decent. I won't say nothin' more about that proposition; but if I can help you any other old way, why, you got my number.
"Gee!" he continued, "I wish I had your nerve. I tried a dozen times to quit and be decent. But the easy money down here always got me -- that and the coke. Tell me all you been doin' since I seen you, and what's went wrong that you couldn't get a job."
She related her experiences; closing with an account of the print-shop man.
"The cheap skate!" exclaimed Eddie. "Gimme his number, and I'll hike down his way to-morrow and touch him for all he's got in his jeans -- it'll teach him a lesson."
"No, Eddie, that wouldn't be setting me a very good example of being decent, would it?"
The man laughed.
"But say," he said, "why is it you don't go after a swell steno job? You say they told you down at the typewriter joint that you was the real cheese and ought to hold any job you could cop off."
"Yes, I know they did," she replied, "but they intimated that they couldn't send me out in answer to a call unless I had better clothes, and you can't buy much on four dollars a week, Eddie, especially if you only get the four some weeks."
Eddie sat for a moment deep in thought. Then he rose and reached for his hat.
"You sit tight here for about ten minutes, Mag," he said, "and I'll be right back. I got some business up the street. I want to see you again when I come back. You won't duck, will you?"
"I'll wait for you, Eddie," she replied.
The man stopped at the cashier's desk and paid the two checks, then he hurried out into the brilliantly lighted street.
It was fifteen minutes before he returned, and when he took his place at the table opposite her the girl did not know that he no longer wore a diamond stickpin, a watch of gold, and a diamond ring.
"Here," he said, shoving a roll of bills across the table to her. "Here's a stake for them swell clothes you need to land a decent job."
LONG before Mr. Ogden Secor returned to the city after his grand jury service had terminated and released him to attend to his own affairs, he had completely forgotten the girl from Farris's and his promise of assistance to her.It was fully a month after his return that he was reminded of the affair by the sight of the Rev. Mr. Pursen at the home of Secor's fiancée where both had dropped in of a late afternoon.
"By the way, Mr. Pursen," said Secor, "did a girl I sent to you for assistance ever apply? She was the girl from Farris's in that case that was brought before the grand jury of which I was foreman."
"No," said the Rev. Mr. Pursen, "she did not come to me. I went to her the very day that Farris was arrested and offered to help her; but I found her entirely unresponsive to my advances. In fact, she seemed totally depraved, and though I labored with her I was finally forced to the conclusion that she was one of those hopelessly lost women which nothing but death can remove from the evil life they cling to by preference."
"Strange," said Mr. Secor; "she completely deceived me. I could have sworn that she was not innately vicious, and that if given a chance she might easily have been helped to a better way of living."
"No," said the Rev. Mr. Pursen; "I did my poor, weak best; but it was all to no avail."
"Too bad," said Mr. Secor, and that would have been the end of it had not fate been planning the perpetration of an odd trick upon him.
Sophia Welles entered at that moment, and both men arose to greet her.
"I have come to beg again, Miss Welles," said Mr. Pursen. "I find that our Society for the Uplift of Erring Women is sadly in need of funds. The secretary's salary is a month in arrears; the stenographer and the two investigators have not been paid for two weeks, and the rent is several days overdue."
"Well, well," murmured Miss Welles sympathetically, "that is too bad. We must certainly do something at once. How much do you need, and what can you rely upon from other sources?"
"We need about two hundred dollars at once," replied the clergyman, "and some arrangement would be very advantageous that would assure us of a permanent income of two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars per month."
"I will subscribe fifty dollars toward the emergency fund at once," said Miss Welles. She looked expectantly toward Mr. Secor.
"What is the nature of the work done by the society?" asked that gentleman.
"The name of the society is self-explanatory," returned Mr. Pursen. "The Society for the Uplift of Erring Women."
"Roughly," Mr. Secor inquired, "how does it function?"
"Our investigators call upon the women whose cases come to our attention -- usually through Municipal Court records -- and endeavor to prevail upon them to attend our Monday evening Uplift Circle. The meetings are held in the church every Monday except during July and August. Here we enjoy a short song service, followed by prayer, and then the women listen to helpful talks by the noble women who are sacrificing their Monday evenings to their poor, fallen sisters."
"Do many of the women you seek to aid attend these meetings?" asked Mr. Secor.
"Unfortunately, no," admitted Mr. Pursen; "possibly five or six, on an average, I should say. The unfortunate part of it is that they seem to have so little real desire to embrace the opportunity we are offering them to begin life anew that seldom if ever do the same women attend our Uplift Circle a second time. You have no conception, Mr. Secor, how discouraging is labor of this nature -- the utter indifference and ingratitude of those we would help is the first and greatest obstacle to our work."
"Just how would you help them, practically?" inquired Mr. Secor.
"By contact with good women; by the beauties of Scripture; by helpful suggestions and example; by impressing upon them their degradation; by -- ah -- "
" Do you find remunerative employment for them?" asked Mr. Secor.
"We have not gone thus far as yet, though that is the ultimate object, of course."
"I should think that it would be the primary object. Between meetings they go back and earn their livings in the old way -- if you have accomplished anything it is undone at once."
"It is difficult to find people who will employ these women once we explain the sort of people they are," replied Mr. Pursen; "but that we hope to be able to do when we have sufficient funds to employ more assistants."
"You have placed none of them in decent employment, then?" asked Mr. Secor.
"Not as yet -- it takes time to accomplish great reforrns -- Rome was not -- "
"Yes, of course," interrupted Mr. Secor; "but, looking at the matter from a purely business standpoint, I cannot see how you are going to raise sufficient funds to carry on any work until you have accomplished something practical with what you have. If four or five paid workers, with the assistance of a number of volunteers, have been unable to effect the regeneration of not a single woman in the six or eight months that the society has been organized, I should consider it a rather risky investment to subscribe any considerable amount for the continuation of the work.
"I don't wish to discourage you," continued Mr. Secor kindly, "but charities to be effective must be treated just as one would treat a business proposition. If a given charity is not producing results it would be better to divert our money to other channels -- there are several well-managed charities, I understand, that are doing considerable practical good."
"Then you think that the Society for the Uplift of Erring Women is poorly managed?" asked Mr. Pursen a trifle acridly.
"It may be and it may not -- there are some things which cannot be done -- impractical things. This may be one of them; or the methods of the society may be faulty. Of course I am in no position to judge, nor do I wish to criticise."
"I can assure you that my cousin, Miss Peebles, is a very conscientious woman," said Mr. Pursen, "and is doing a noble work intelligently."
"Oh," said Mr. Secor; "I ask your pardon. I did not know that the secretary of the society is your cousin."
"She is," continued Mr. Pursen, "and the other active workers in the society are relatives of the good women who are aiding us in our thankless task."
"You mean by active workers -- "
"Those who are on salary -- not being financially able to devote their time to the work gratuitously," explained Mr. Pursen.
"I think," said Miss Welles, "that the society is doing a very noble work under most adverse conditions, and that we should do all in our power to help it financially, as well as to give it our moral support. It is very easy, Ogden, to criticise."
"I am sorry," said Mr. Secor, "if I have seemed to disparage the work of the society; but knowing as I do that it is rather a pet of yours, Sophia, I wanted to do something really worth while for it -- if my money would do any good. There is no value in throwing money away for sentiment when there are so many places where it can be used to practical advantage.
"I should like very much to talk with Miss Peebles, and if I find that there is good foundation for the belief that fallen women can be really saved or benefited through your organization, I shall be most happy to subscribe toward an endowment fund, and influence my friends to do likewise."
"That is very kind of you, Mr. Secor," said Mr. Pursen, relaxing as he scented a substantial donation.
"Where is the office of the society?" asked Mr. Secor. "I shall make it a point to see Miss Peebles to-morrow."
"The office is in the church," said Mr. Pursen. "You will find Miss Peebles there about eleven o'clock. She is usually there between eleven and twelve daily."
"I thought from your reference to rent," remarked Mr. Secor, "that the society probably had a down-town office."
"No," replied Mr. Pursen; "we felt that as long as the society would have to pay rent it would be better to give this rent to the church rather than to outsiders, and we have made the amount very much smaller than the society could have obtained similar space for in the Loop."
"Oh," said Mr. Secor, "I see. Well, then, if possible, I shall call upon Miss Peebles to-morrow; but do not tell her to expect me, for I may find business engagements will prevent my seeing her before the first of the week."
"I hope not," Mr. Pursen said; "for I am sure that Miss Peebles can explain the work and scope of the society much more interestingly than I, in my poor, weak way. "
"We might look up that girl from Farris's again," suggested Mr. Secor, "and see what Miss Peebles can do for her."
"She is too degraded, I am afraid, ever to respond to the kind offices of good men and women. I think that she prefers her present life, sad as it may seem to us. Poor thing! I tried so hard to win her to godliness.
"But I must he going, now. I am so very glad to have met you again, Mr. Secor. May we not hope to see you oftener at our little church gatherings? In my poor, weak way I shall endeavor to make you welcome."
"Just a moment, Mr. Pursen," said Miss Welles, "until I make out a check for the Uplift Society."
After the Rev. Mr. Pursen had departed with his check Sophia turned to Secor.
"Isn't he splendid?" she exclaimed.
So noble and sincere in his desire to better his fellow man! So magnanimous in his practical relations with the poor creatures of the under-world!"
"Rather nice chap to have for a cousin, I should say, were one in quest of remunerative employment with short hours," replied Mr. Secor with a trace of dryness."
Miss Welles looked at her fiancée sharply.
"How perfectly unkind, Ogden," she exclaimed. "Really, I'd never have thought it of you. Mr. Pursen is one of nature's own noblemen."
"All right, Sophie; we won't quarrel about Mr. Pursen, although I must say that if his attitude toward that girl I spoke to him about is a decent sample of his magnanimous practicality, or whatever you called it, I am afraid it won't carry him very far in that class of work."
"And you won't help him?" she asked.
"If you wish me to, yes," he replied; "but if you were not interested I should feel that I'd rather contribute my money directly to the support of his indigent cousin and his church rather than through the medium of the Society for the Uplift of Erring Women. He'd get it all then, and wouldn't have to whack up with the indigent relatives of the noble women who sacrifice their Monday evenings, except during July and August, to the uplift of their less-fortunate sisters."
"You are entirely horrid to-day, Ogden,"pouted Miss Welles. "You do not like Mr. Pursen."
"Bless you, child, I don't know him. I've met him here perhaps a half dozen times -- here, and in the newspapers. About all I've noticed about him is the poor, weak way he has of getting into print."
Miss Welles flushed. She had heard that criticism of her hero before.
"You are just like father," she said.
"He can't, or won't understand how much Mr. Pursen shrinks from the unpleasant notoriety his great reform work forces upon him. Like you, father seems to imagine that he courts publicity, while as a matter of fact he suffers it solely because he cannot avoid it, and because he knows that only by bringing the conditions of vice that exist in the city clearly before the people can they be awakened to the gravity of the issue which confronts them. I think the fact that he goes on and on regardless of the frequency with which the newspapers drag his name into publicity is one of the finest things about him -- it proves conclusively his sincerity and his manly courage."
"All right, Sophie," replied Secor with one of his pleasant smiles, "if he succeeds in saving a single woman during his lifetime he will not have lived in vain, and there is every reason to hope for the best -- Mr. Pursen is still a very young man."
The talk drifted then from Mr. Pursen and reform to more personal and intimate matters. They discussed their plans for the future. Secor broached the subject of a wedding date for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time Sophia Welles could not bring herself to be very definite in the matter.
She fully intended to marry Ogden Secor. She had not worked laboriously a whole year to that end with any intention of relinquishing her prize now that she had won it; but Miss Welles was in no great haste to wed. She loved Secor as well as she knew how. He was quite good-looking, had plenty of wealth, and a social position second to none in the city. Had he had nothing but the social position, Miss Welles could not have found it in her heart to give him up, but with such a combination of assets he was by far the best catch in many a season.
She had come from a small Indiana town where her father had made several fortunes in the automobile industry -- saving them all and investing them wisely. She did not need to marry for money, though an alliance that would combine the wealth that would one day be hers with that of a wealthy husband was not to be ignored. What she did need was a stepping-stone to the social position she craved, but could not attain on the strength of her own name. Both she and her mother considered Ogden Secor an ideal stepping-stone, though neither had ever mentioned such a thing to the other.
As a matter of fact the Welleses were extremely nice people. Refined, educated cultured. Much nicer, if the truth could have found a champion of sufficient bravery to admit it, than many of the families to whose homes the feminine contingent of the Welles household craved entree; but their name was unknown in this new environment.
It had never graced a special brand of ham; it had never been intimately related and for generations with the filth and crime of the politics of the municipality; it did not blazon itself before the public eye from above the doorways of a hundred ten-cent lunch-counters -- no, the Welleses were new, unknown; they did not belong.
But they meant to.
Ogden Secor had always known nice girls, pretty girls, rich girls. He did not succumb to the wiles of Sophia Welles at first sight, for she had nothing new to offer him; but she had that way with her which some women have of suggesting to a man a manner of proprietorship over them -- a something that appeals to the protective instinct of the male.
It is done insidiously; you cannot put your finger on a single act that typifies it; yet before long the man comes to feel, without thinking about it, perhaps, that the woman belongs to him in a way. Then she plays her trump card. Just when she has him resting easily and comfortably in the belief that she looks to him for advice and guidance, she traps him into an attempt to exercise the power he thinks is his. Then she bowls him over merrily and does precisely as she pleases.
What is the result? Take away from a man by force something that he has come to believe he possessed, and you create a burning desire for the thing -- though maybe before he would not have given a nickel for it.
So, when Ogden Secor discovered that Miss Welles admitted not his proprietorship over her, he immediately craved a real proprietorship, and the result was he discovered that he loved her.
They had been engaged now for three months, but the wedding day seemed as far in the future as ever. Miss Welles was having an excellent time as the fiancée of Mr. Ogden Secor. Already she had tasted of the fruits of conquest. Doors had opened to her that had previously been impregnable. She was in no haste to relinquish her freedom.
The sudden death of the elder Secor early in the spring had, of course, necessitated a delay in the wedding plans; for both Miss and Mrs. Welles desired a pretentious ceremony. It seemed now that a year at least must elapse before the marriage could take place.
As for Mr. Secor, he attempted to persuade his betrothed to slip away with him and be quietly married in some nearby town. Her father and mother could accompany them, and everything would be regular and lovely. He hated the idea of "the circus," as he called the affair the two women were planning.
But they would not listen to him.
Several times during the winter Secor met the Rev. Mr. Pursen at Miss Welles's. The more he saw of him the less he liked him, and the more he let Miss Welles see that he disliked her "parson," the more loyal she became to him.
"One would think that you were engaged to Pursen instead of to me," complained Mr. Secor on one occasion. "He is becoming a regular pest. I can scarcely ever find an opportunity to see you alone. Doesn't he know that we are engaged? Hasn't he any sense?"
"He has a great deal of sense, Ogden, she replied, "and he knows that we are engaged. He also knows that you do not like him. He has told me so."
"Then why does he persist in hanging around while I am here, Sophie?" he demanded.
"I think he wants to show his friendliness toward you and to win your friendship. I think it is perfectly sweet and noble of him -- a sort of martyrship to brotherly love, as it were."
Carefully edited, Mr. Secor's reply would read: "Oh, piffle!"
"Ogden! How can you!" she cried, "I didn't know that you had such an uncharitable strain in your make-up."
"Clay feet will out," he laughed good-naturedly; "but really, Sophie, I'm sorry I was nasty. Forgive me, and I'll do my best to like your parson -- in my poor, weak way.''
"You'll have to like him, Ogden," she replied, "for we are bound to see a great deal of him! In the work that I am trying to do his assistance is invaluable -- I am sure that the three of us can accomplish a great deal of good in this city could we but work in harmony -- whole-heartedly for the uplift."
"Anything to make you happy Sophie," he said, and then the conversation turned to other things.
When he left she watched him as he walked to the curb and entered his car. Miss Welles was very proud of her fiancée. She noted his splendid carriage, his strong face and well-set head; and then she sighed. She wished that he understood her hopes and aspirations, and was in sympathy with them as was -- well -- Mr. Pursen, for example.
He understood.
She found herself, quite unexpectedly, wondering why fate had not given Mr. Pursen a fat bank account and an old and socially honored name. How much more he could have accomplished, thus bucklered for the fight!
LATE in December Mr. Secor was called to New York on a matter of business."I'll be gone two or three weeks, Stickler," he said to his office manager; "and it'll be an excellent time to break in Miss Smith's successor. She'll be with us until the first of January, and that'll give her time to coach whoever you employ in her stead. Be sure you get a young woman of intelligence, and have her well versed in her duties before I return -- I won't want to have to suffer the sorrows incident to breaking in a new stenographer myself with a bunch of accumulated matter piled up and waiting for me."
"Yes, sir," replied Mr. Stickler; "I'll see that you have a second Miss Smith if there's one to be found in the city. Too bad she had to go and get married -- just when she was becoming invaluable."
"Very inconsiderate of her, Stickler, I'm sure," said Secor, laughing.
So Mr. Stickler inserted want ads in three papers and telephoned to the employment departments of three typewriter manufacturers. And it so happened that the following day June Lathrop, decently clothed with the money from Eddie's jewelry, walked into one of these departments, asking for an assignment.
The woman in charge looked up with a smile.
"Why, good morning, Miss Lathrop," she said. "Where in the world have you been? I thought we'd lost you entirely."
She had never before realized what a really beautiful girl Miss Lathrop was. A few months since she had explained to her in as kindly a way as possible that it would be impossible for her to place her in the class of offices to which they catered unless she could come better clothed. She had not seen her again after that interview until now, and she had often wondered if she had offended the girl.
"Oh, I've been doing temporary work about town," answered June; "but now I want a chance at a permanent position. Haven't you something that you could send me out on? Something really good."
"I've just the thing, Miss Lathrop," replied the woman, fingering through a number of index cards in a little box on her desk.
Presently she found what she sought, and for a moment was busy transcribing the contents of the card to a blank form.
"Here," she said finally; "go to this number in the Railway Exchange and ask for Mr. Stickler. He wants a girl of more experience than you have had, but I really believe that you are fully competent to fill the position satisfactorily, and I have told him so in this note. I have asked him to give you a trial."
"I don't know how I can thank you enough," cried the girl. "I shall make good, for I *must* make good."
"Good luck, then," called the woman, as June left.
In the Railway Exchange Building June found the suite number she sought. The door to the main office was open, and she did not see the lettering upon it as she entered. She wondered what the nature of the business might be, but that it was profitable was evidenced by the thick carpet upon the floor of the outer office; and by the simple elegance of the desks at which a number of clerks were working.
At the information desk June asked for Mr. Stickler, presenting her note of introduction to the office-boy in charge. He was a tall, somber youth of sixteen who looked fully twenty-one. He eyed June from beneath stern brows, and then slunk silently toward a mahogany door upon the opposite side of the general office. Here he turned cautiously to cast a sudden, veiled look of suspicion in the girl's direction.
"How perfectly weird," she thought. "He makes me feel as though I were a sneak-thief."
Three minutes later June turned with a little jump to find the young man standing just behind her scowling down upon her in the most malevolent manner. He had left the private office by another door and entered the reception hall from the main corridor of the building.
"Oh!" she exclaimed; "you startled me."
The youth almost smiled.
"Come!" he whispered. "Follow me," and on silent feet he led her toward the private office across the room.
Here she was ushered into the presence of Mr. Stickler -- a bald-headed man with a thick neck and close-set eyes. At sight of the girl's face Mr. Stickler beamed pleasantly.
"Good morning," he said. "Have a chair. You come well recommended, I see. Mrs. Carson has never failed to furnish us with the most competent help that we have had. She tells me that you have had little practical experience; but she is positive that you can do our work most satisfactorily."
"If it is not too technical I am sure I can," replied June.
"There is nothing about it but what you can learn quickly if you set yourself to it," replied Mr. Stickler kindly. He had interviewed a dozen applicants already and he was tiring of the job. This was the first who had been good to look at; and good looks were a primary requisite to employment under Mr. Stickler. June's face had won more than half the battle for her.
"Would you mind taking a little dictation now and transcribing it for me, as a sort of test, you know?" he asked.
"Not at all; I should be very glad to," she replied.
"Good! " he exclaimed. "There are many applicants who will not take a test. They say it is unfair."
"It is as fair for one as another," she replied. "I cannot see how you are to judge as to my qualifications in any other way."
Mr. Stickler drew a note-book and pencil from his desk, and June removed her wraps and gloves. For five minutes he dictated continuously and rather rapidly; but he enunciated his words distinctly, and not once did June find it necessary to stop him or ask for a repetition.
When he had finished he sat back in his chair and smiled at her. He had putposely made the test unusually hard, for he had decided that the girl would do -- she was too good-looking to be lost -- and so he wanted an excuse in case she fell down on the test. If he made it exceptionally difficult, it would not prove that she was incompetent should she make numerous errors, for even an easy test is a nerve-racking experience, and the best of stenographers often fall down through nervousness.
Of course, if the result proved that she was absolutely hopeless, he could not employ her; but if she showed the slightest indication of ability, he would give her a trial.
"Do you think you got it?" he asked.
"Why, of course!" she replied, surprised.
"Good! I made it as hard as I could. If you can transcribe that with less than ten per cent errors, you will be doing splendidly for one entirely unaccustomed to my dictation and the terms I used."
"Where can I find a machine?" she asked.
Mr. Stickler touched a bell.
"Miss Smith," he said to the young lady who entered in response to his summons, "this is Miss Lathrop. She has just taken a test. Will you let her use your machine, please, to transcribe for a few minutes?"
"Certainly. Come with me, Miss Lathrop." And she led June to a small room off the private office.
In ten minutes June knocked upon Mr. Stickler's door.
"Come in," he called, and as he saw who it was: "Stuck?" he asked with a smile.
"No, indeed; I've finished."
"Well, well; that's fine. Let me see it."
June handed him a typewritten sheet, standing before him as he scanned it.
"Excellent!" he said when he had finished reading it. "Excellent! Not an error. I think I need look no further, Miss Lathrop, if we can arrange the question of wages satisfactorily. Be seated, please. Now, what do you believe would satisfy you to start?"
"Oh, I'd rather leave that to you," said June.
"Miss Smith has been with us for five years," said Mr. Stickler. "She is leaving on the first to be married. We pay her twenty-five dollars a week. On the first she would have been raised to thirty had she remained. Would you care to start at twenty, with every assurance of an increase as soon as you are familiar with our work?"
Nine dollars a week was the largest wage June had ever received since she left Farris's, and that for but a single week in a temporary position. Would she accept twenty? She tried not to look too eager. With difficulty she seemed to hesitate, as though weighing in her mind the possibilities of the future against the present small pittance that had been offered her. Mr. Stickler eyed her steadily.
"The hours are not bad," he commenced.
"I do not care anything about the hours," she replied.
Mr. Stickler had it on his tongue's end to raise it to twenty-five -- there were few girls applying for positions who did not ask about the hours at the first opportunity they had. Here was an exceptionally rapid and accurate stenographer who cared nothing about hours -- she was indeed a find; and further, she was the finest-looking girl be had ever seen in his life. But before he had an opportunity June spoke.
"I think that will be satisfactory," she said. "When shall you want me?"
"When can you come?"
"Any time."
"Eight-thirty to-morrow morning."
"Thank you," said June. "I'll be here promptly. Good day."
"Good day, Miss Lathrop."
In the reception hall the furtive-eyed office-boy shot a keen glance at the young woman through half-closed lids as he looked up from some loose, printed sheets over which he had been bent in close study. He saw her glance at the name upon the door, which was now visible to her as she approached the doorway. He saw her give a sudden start and pale as though she had seen a dead man. Her hands went suddenly to her breast as she stood wide-eyed, gazing in horror at the neat, black lettering of the name.
Then she caught the boy's eyes upon her, and with a little effort she regained her composure and walked calmly from the office.
"John Secor & Co.!" she murmured to herself. "My God, I can never do it!"
But she did, and the next morning found her at work in the mahogany-furnished inner office of John Secor & Co. The girl could not recall that she had spent such another night of indecision and anguish for many a long month, until, with the close approach of dawn, she had determined to stifle the sorrow and loathing that thought of constant employment in that office induced, and take the position.
The twenty dollars a week meant to her, possibly, life itself, as well as the means of pursuing the straight and narrow path upon which a young man's smile had set her feet. She often wondered about him and if she should ever see him again. Some day she would like to thank him, she felt, for what he had done for her. Doubtless he had forgotten both her and the incident -- she rather hoped that he had.
With her first week's pay, June partially repaid Eddie the Dip the money he had loaned her. For this purpose she met him at the little joint around the corner where one can feed up swell on two bits. Eddie was apparently as delighted with June's success as she herself, and that his pleasure was sincere was evidenced by the genuine disinclination he showed to accept a return of his money. But the girl insisted, and at last Eddie took the bills reluctantly.
In the far corner of the dingy restaurant a heavy man sat alone at a little table. He had been buried in an evening paper as the two had entered, so had not noticed them. When finally he looked up, running his shrewd eyes quickly about the room, he recognized Eddie the Dip, who sat facing him upon the farther side of the eating-place, near the cashier's desk.
No changed expression marked his recognition. Immediately he resumed his paper, turning in his chair so that while appearing to be reading he might surreptitiously watch the newcomers through the fly-specked mirror that circled the room above the wainscot. He had no further interest in them than that of semiofficial curiosity, and having recognized the man, he wished to discover the identity of his companion.
It was not until the two rose to leave that the girl turned her head so that the man in the far corner caught a view of her features. At sight of them he pursed his lips into a silent whistle of surprise; then Eddie the Dip paid the checks and the two passed out into the brilliantly lighted street.
The man at the table drew a note-book from his pocket, and with a stub of pencil wrote, laboriously, two names, the date, the hour, and the place; then he resumed the demolition of a large platter of "ham and."
Outside the restaurant Eddie bade June good night.
"You run along now, kid," he said.
"It wouldn't help you none to be seen with me."
The girl objected, though she knew well the truth of his statement. He alone in all the great city had evinced disinterested friendship in her and had given her real and substantial aid when she most needed it. Her sense of gratitude and loyalty was strong, and she would rather have missed almost anything than to have hurt the young man's feelings.
Doubtless Eddie guessed the truth of her sentiments; for he was firm in his insistence that she "run along home."
"You've been so good to me, Eddie," she said, "I -- "
"Forget it," admonished the Dip.
"What's money for, anyway?"
"It is not the money I was thinking about," she replied, "though, of course, I could have done nothing without it -- it's that you have been willing to believe that I wanted to be on the square -- that I could be, and were willing to help me without" -- she hesitated -- "without expecting anything in return."
"Have I ever done anything to you, Mag," he asked with a laugh, "that gives you any license to class me with them Commonwealth Avenue or Lake Shore Drive guys?"
The following Monday morning June sat at her desk in the little office just outside that of the president of John Secor & Co. Ten days had passed since she commenced work there, and under the careful tutorage of Miss Smith and Mr. Stickler she had progressed rapidly in the assimilation of the details of her work.
Ogden Secor, the president of the company, she had not seen, as his return from New York had been delayed. She found herself wondering what he might look like, and if she should be able to continue in his employ after he returned. Now it was not quite so bad, for he was just a name; but when she should be compelled to come into daily contact with him, sit for hours, perhaps, close beside him as he dictated, would it not be very different and very terrible? The girl shuddered.
It was ten o'clock when Mr. Stickler opened the door from the president's office and called her. As Mr. Stickler often had given her work in this office before, she gathered up her note-book and pencil as she replied to his summons.
Somehow she did not like Mr. Stickler particularly. He had a way of looking at her out of his fishy eyes that fell little short of being insultingly suggestive. When Mr. Secor returned she knew that she would be released from this distasteful ogling -- unless Mr. Secor chanced to be of the same brand.
This, however, she doubted; for since her entrance into the world of business the girl had learned that the great majority of office men accord the same respect to their female coworkers -- as they do to their own sisters. That there were exceptions she had also discovered.
At the door Mr. Stickler met her.
"Come in," he said, "Mr. Secor has returned; I wish to introduce you to him."
June felt suddenly all cold. She had known that this must come some time, but to that very instant she had not dreamed how terribly she dreaded the ordeal. Her heart seemed to go dead within her, and it was with difficulty that she raised her eyes to the face of the man who had risen courteously at her entrance. That she knew he had never before set eyes upon her did not lighten her burden of apprehension -- it seemed that he must read the tragic truth that ran screaming through her brain.
And then at last she looked at him -- the pleasant, honest smile; the cordial, outstretched hand. From cold she went hot. Could such a frightful contretemps actually occur in real life?
The man before her -- her employer -- was the young man whose kindly words had set her upon the road of righteousness! Would he remember her?
Chapter VIII: Sammy The Sleuth
OGDEN SECOR did not recognize June Lathrop as Maggie Lynch, the girl from Farris's, and it was with relief that almost found expression in an audible sigh that the girl returned to her desk in her own office.Here she surprised the lank and somber office-boy, Sammy, in the act of closing one of the drawers of her desk.
"What do you want, Sammy?" she asked pleasantly.
The youth went from white to red, and from red to scarlet. He stammered and coughed -- trying to frame an apology, until June, from mild wonderment, became keenly suspicious.
"I'm awfully sorry, Miss Lathrop," he managed to get out at last. "I didn't mean any harm -- I was only practising."
"Practising?" exclaimed the girl. "Practising what?"
"I suppose," said Sammy, "that I'll have to tell you now; but I didn't want any one to know until I had graduated and got a position with Pinkerton."
"Pinkerton?" questioned June, still at a loss to make head or tail of what the youth was leading to. "What has practising or Pinkerton to do with searching my desk surreptitiously? It was a very ungentlemanly thing to do, Sammy, and I really ought to tell Mr. Stickler about it."
"Oh, please don't do that," wailed Sammy. "Please don't and I'll tell you all about it."
"All right," said June, "now tell me."
"You see," said Sammy nervously, "I'm taking a correspondence course in a detective school, and a part of each lesson is to put into practise what I have learned in former lessons. Just now I was practising searching a burglar's flat. Almost every day I practise shadowing."
"Shadowing?" exclaimed June. "What is shadowing? How do you do it?"
"Oh, it's easy," replied Sammy, his confidence returning as he discovered that June appeared to have forgiven the liberties he had taken with her desk.
"You see," he continued, "a detective has to be able to follow a suspect all over without being seen himself. I practise on lots of people -- Mr. Stickler, Mr. Secor, Miss Smith, and the rest of them. When they go to lunch I shadow them, a different one nearly every noon. Friday I shadowed you -- right into the Lunch Club on Wabash Avenue, and ate at a table behind you, and followed you back to the office and you never got onto me at all."
"Ugh!" shivered June. "How uncanny. Don't you ever dare shadow me again Sammy -- promise me," and Sammy promised.
After the new stenographer had left his office, Ogden Secor tried to recall where he had known her before. He was positive that her face was familiar, and connected with some event in his life that was none too pleasant; but try as he would he could not place the girl. At last he dropped the matter from his mind.
For several months thereafter the routine of June's new life ran on smoothly and uninterruptedly. She saved the major portion of her salary, and once more met Eddie the Dip in the little restaurant that she might pay him the balance of the money she owed him.
Daily association with the life of the office of John Secor & Co. and its president eventually dulled the first revulsion she had experienced at thought of taking employment there. She found Ogden Secor all that she had grown to believe him since the day that he had come into her life from out of the grand jury room.
Of Mr. Stickler she grew more and more suspicious. There was no tangible overt act upon his part on which she could put her finger; nevertheless, she could have sworn, after a month of him, that he was a "hunter" without the nerve to hunt. He was, she grew sure, the sort that would take advantage of her first misstep to snare her, and so, without fearing him, she watched him and herself lest he might find some pretext upon which to make an initial advance toward her.
With the exception of Sammy, the office force was most uninteresting to any one outside themselves. Sammy was a never-ending source of joy to her now that she understood the motives which prompted his stealthy, catlike tread, his furtive glances, and his highly melodramatic appearances from directions in which one would least expect him to materilize.
As June never laughed at him -- openly -- he took a great liking to her, coming to her with his new lessons, with his hopes and his aspirations. His one and only ambition was to become a Pinkerton man, and he fully believed that once armed with the diploma of the correspondence school to which he paid half his weekly salary, it would be simply a matter of presenting it to the head of the detective agency to insure him an open-armed reception and an immediate appointment -- didn't the prospectus of the school say so almost in so many words?
So secure had June grown to feel in the belief that her old life was absolutely dead and forgotten, and that Ogden Secor would never know that his private stenographer had been an inmate of Abe Farris's, that the shock of an occurrence through which she had to pass four months after taking the position all but unnerved her.
There was a caller in Secor's office, and as the buzzer upon June's desk sounded she took up her note-book and pencil to respond as she was called upon to do a dozen times in a day.
Scarce had she entered the inner office, however, than her heart seemed to cease its beating. Facing her, and looking squarely into her eyes as she passed through the doorway, sat the Rev. Theodore Pursen.
A look of half-recognition lighted his expression at sight of her. Instantly June jumped to the conclusion that he had come there to expose her but she managed to hold herself under perfect control as she advanced across the room to Secor's side, nor did she even, by a second glance at the visitor's face, betray the fact that she recalled ever having seen him before.
Secor handed her a memorandum.
"Make out a check," he said, "for this amount to the order of the Society for the Uplift of Erring Women."
June took the slip of paper and returned to her own office.
"Your secretary's face is quite familiar to me," remarked Pursen, after the girl had closed the door.
"Yes?" queried Secor politely, and uninterestedly. As a matter of fact, he was interested in nothing much that interested the Rev. Mr. Pursen -- other than Sophia Welles.
"I am quite sure that I know her, but I cannot place her," continued Mr. Pursen. "Possibly her name might recall her to me."
"Her name is Lathrop," replied Secor.
Pursen shook his head. "I must be mistaken after all," he said, "I never knew any one of that name," and then June returned with the check.
For several days she was in a state of nervous apprehension, momentarily expecting a summons from either Mr. Secor or Mr. Stickler that would close her career with John Secor & Co.; but why she should dread discharge she could not guess, for she no longer felt a single doubt but that she should always be able to find pleasant and lucrative employment.
As a matter of fact, she finally decided, it was not so much discharge she feared, as that Ogden Secor should know her for what she once had been. The thought sent her white with terror, and with it came another thought -- how much did her daily contact with Ogden Secor mean to her more than she had even faintly suspected?
Never before had this idea impinged upon her thoughts. She tried to thrust it from her. It was horrible. How horrible only she could guess; and yet, once fastened upon her, it clung tenaciously, a mighty load upon her conscience -- a veritable Old Man of the Sea -- so that she dreaded coming into Secor's presence for fear he might guess not only her secret, but as well the awful truth which made it the hideous thing it was.
Weeks rolled by. September came. June was once more lulled into a feeling of security. Secor was in New York on business. Sammy had been diligently practising his lesson on thieves' jargon upon June until, c