panes of the window. Without, the young man could see roofs drearily white in the dawning. The point of light yellowed and grew brighter, until the golden rays of the morning sun came in bravely and strong. They touched with radiant color the form of a small fat man, who snored in stuttering fashion. His round and shiny bald head glowed suddenly with the valor of a decoration. He sat up, blinked at the sun, swore fretfully, and pulled his blanket over the ornamental splendors of his head.
The youth contentedly watched this rout of the shadows before the bright spears of the sun, and presently he slumbered. When he awoke he heard the voice of the assassin raised in valiant curses. Putting up his head, he perceived his comrade seated on the side of the cot engaged in scratching his neck with long finger-nails that rasped like files.
“Hully Jee, dis is a new breed. They’ve got can-openers on their feet.” He continued in a violent tirade.
The young man hastily unlocked his closet and took out his shoes and hat. As he sat on the side of the cot lacing his shoes, he glanced about and saw that daylight had made the room comparatively commonplace and uninteresting. The men, whose faces seemed stolid, serene or absent, were engaged in dressing, while a great crackle of bantering conversation arose.
A few were parading in unconcerned nakedness. Here and there were men of brawn, whose skins shone clear and ruddy. They took splendid poses, standing massively like chiefs. When they had dressed in their ungainly garments there was an extraordinary change. They then showed bumps and deficiencies of all kinds.
There were others who exhibited many deformities. Shoulders were slanting, humped, pulled this way and pulled that way. And notable among these latter men was the little fat man who had refused to allow his head to be glorified. His pudgy form, builded like a pear, bustled to and fro, while he swore in fishwife fashion. It appeared that some article of his apparel had vanished.
The young man attired speedily, and went to his friend the assassin. At first the latter looked dazed at the sight of the youth. This face seemed to be appealing to him through the cloud wastes of his memory. He scratched his neck and reflected. At last he grinned, a broad smile gradually spreading until his countenance was a round illumination. “Hello, Willie,” he cried cheerily.
“Hello,” said the young man. “Are yeh ready t’ fly?”
“Sure.” The assassin tied his shoe carefully with some twine and came ambling.
When he reached the street the young man experienced no sudden relief from unholy atmospheres. He had forgotten all about them, and had been breathing naturally, and with no sensation of discomfort or distress.
He was thinking of these things as he walked along the street, when he was suddenly startled by feeling the assassin’s hand, trembling with excitement, clutching his arm, and when the assassin spoke, his voice went into quavers from a supreme agitation.
“I’ll be hully, bloomin’ blowed if there wasn’t a feller with a nightshirt on up there in that joint.”
The youth was bewildered for a moment, but presently he turned to smile indulgently at the assassin’s humor.
“Oh, you’re a damned liar,” he merely said.
Whereupon the assassin began to gesture extravagantly, and take oath by strange gods. He frantically placed himself at the mercy of remarkable fates if his tale were not true.
“Yes, he did! I cross m’ heart thousan’ times!” he protested, and at the moment his eyes were large with amazement, his mouth wrinkled in unnatural glee.
“Yessir! A nightshirt! A hully white nightshirt!”
“You lie!”
“No, sir! I hope ter die b’fore I kin git anudder ball if there wasn’t a jay wid a hully, bloomin’ white nightshirt!”
His face was filled with the infinite wonder of it. “A hully white nightshirt,” he continually repeated.
The young man saw the dark entrance to a basement restaurant. There was a sign which read “No mystery about our hash”! and there were other age-stained and world-battered legends which told him that the place was within his means. He stopped before it and spoke to the assassin. “I guess I’ll git somethin’ t’ eat.”
At this the assassin, for some reason, appeared to be quite embarrassed. He gazed at the seductive front of the eating place for a moment. Then he started slowly up the street. “Well, good-bye, Willie,” he said bravely.
For an instant the youth studied the departing figure. Then he called out, “Hol’ on a minnet.” As they came together he spoke in a certain fierce way, as if he feared that the other would think him to be charitable. “Look-a-here, if yeh wanta git some breakfas’ I’ll lend yeh three cents t’ do it with. But say, look-a-here, you’ve gota git out an’ hustle. I ain’t goin’ t’ support yeh, or I’ll go broke b’fore night. I ain’t no millionaire.”
“I take me oath, Willie,” said the assassin earnestly, “th’ on’y thing I really needs is a ball. Me t’roat feels like a fryin’-pan. But as I can’t get a ball, why, th’ next bes’ thing is breakfast, an’ if yeh do that for me, b’Gawd, I say yeh was th’ whitest lad I ever see.”
They spent a few moments in dexterous exchanges of phrases, in which they each protested that the other was, as the assassin had originally said, “a respecter’ble gentlem’n.” And they concluded with mutual assurances that they were the souls of intelligence and virtue. Then they went into the restaurant.
There was a long counter, dimly lighted from hidden sources. Two or three men in soiled white aprons rushed here and there.
The youth bought a bowl of coffee for two cents and a roll for one cent. The assassin purchased the same. The bowls were webbed with brown seams, and the tin spoons wore an air of having emerged from the first pyramid. Upon them were black mosslike encrustations of age, and they were bent and scarred from the attacks of long-forgotten teeth. But over their repast the wanderers waxed warm and mellow. The assassin grew affable as the hot mixture went soothingly down his parched throat, and the young man felt courage flow in his veins.
Memories began to throng in on the assassin, and he brought forth long tales, intricate, incoherent, delivered with a chattering swiftness as from an old woman. “—great job out’n Orange. Boss keep yeh hustlin’ though all time. I was there three days, and then I went an’ ask ’im t’ lend me a dollar. ‘G-g-go ter the devil,’ he ses, an’ I lose me job.”
“South no good. Damn niggers work for twenty-five an’ thirty cents a day. Run white man out. Good grub, though. Easy livin’.”
“Yas; useter work little in Toledo, raftin’ logs. Make two or three dollars er day in the spring. Lived high. Cold as ice, though, in the winter.”
“I was raised in northern N’York. O-a-ah, yeh jest oughto live there. No beer ner whisky, though, way off in the woods. But all th’ good hot grub yeh can eat. B’Gawd, I hung around there long as I could till th’ ol’ man fired me. ‘Git t’ hell outa here, yeh wuthless skunk, git t’ hell outa here, an’ go die,’ he ses. ‘You’re a hell of a father,’ I ses, ‘you are,’ an’ I quit ’im.”
As they were passing from the dim eating place, they encountered an old man who was trying to steal forth with a tiny package of food, but a tall man with an indomitable moustache stood dragon fashion, barring the way of escape. They heard the
