Late in the afternoon Curly saw signs of the city's outposts--the side-tracks were multiplying in long lines of freight-cars. Then Curly wakened Archie, and when the train slowed up, they dropped from the car.
It was good to feel once more their feet on the ground, to walk and stretch their tired, numb muscles, good to breathe the open air and, more than all, good to see the city looming under its pall of smoke.
They joined the throngs of working-men; and they might have passed for working-men themselves, for Curly wore overalls, as he always did on his expeditions, and they were both so black from the smoke and cinders of their journey, that one might easily have mistaken their grime for that of honest toil.
They came to the river, pressed up the long approach to its noble bridge, and submerged themselves in the stream of life that flowed across it, the stream that was made up of all sorts of people--working-men, clerks, artisans, shop-girls, children, men and women, the old and the young, each individual with his burden or his care or his secret guilt, his happiness, his hope, his comedy or his tragedy, losing himself in the mass, merging his identity in the crowd, doing his part to make the great epic of life that flowed across the bridge as the great river flowed under it--the stream in which no one could tell the good from the bad, or even wish thus to separate them, in which no one could tell Archie or Curly from the teacher of a class in a Sunday-school. Here on the bridge man's little distinctions were lost and people were people merely, bound together by the common possession of good and bad intentions, of good and bad deeds, of frailties, errors, sorrows, sufferings and mistakes, of fears and doubts, of despairs, of hopes and triumphs and heroisms and victories and boundless dreams.
Beside them rumbled a long procession of trucks and wagons and carriages, street-cars moved in yellow procession, ringing their cautionary gongs; the draw in the middle of the bridge vibrated under the tread of all those marching feet; its three red lights were already burning overhead. Far below, the river, growing dark, rolled out to the lake; close to its edge on the farther shore could be descried, after long searching of the eye, the puffs of white smoke from crawling trains; vessels could be picked out, tugs and smaller craft, great propellers that bore coal and ore and lumber up and down the lakes; here and there a white passenger-steamer, but all diminutive in the long perspective. Above them the freight-depots squatted; above these elevators lifted themselves, and then, as if on top of them, the great buildings of the city heaved themselves as by some titanic convulsive effort in a lofty pile, surmounted by the high office buildings in the center, with here and there towers and spires striking upward from the jagged sky-line. All this pile was in a neutral shade of gray,--lines, details, distinctions, all were lost; these huge monuments of man's vanity, or greed, or ambition, these expressions of his notions of utility or of beauty, were heaped against a smoky sky, from which the light was beginning to fade. Somewhere, hidden far down in this mammoth pile, among all the myriads of people that swarmed and lost themselves below it, were Gusta and Dick Ward, old man Koerner and Marriott, Modderwell and Danner, Bostwick and Parrish, and Danny Gibbs, and Mason, and Eades, but they were lost in the mass of human beings--the preachers and thieves, the doctors and judges, and aldermen, and merchants, and working-men, and social leaders, and prostitutes--who went to make up the swarm of people that crawled under and through this pile of iron and stone, thinking somehow that the distinctions and the grades they had fashioned in their little minds made them something more or something less than what they really were.
II
And yet, after having crossed the bridge in the silence that was the mysterious effect of the descent of evening over the city, after having been gathered back again for a few moments into human relations with their fellow mortals, Archie and Curly became thieves again. This change in them occurred when they saw two policemen standing at the corner of High Street, where the crowd from the bridge, having climbed the slope of River Street, began to flow in diverging lines this way and that. The change was the more marked in Archie, for at sight of the policemen he stopped suddenly.
"Look!" he whispered.
"Come on!" commanded Curly, and Archie fell into step. "You never want to halt that way; it don't make any difference with harness bulls, but if a fly dick was around, it might put him hip."
It was a relief to Archie when at last they turned into Danny Gibbs's; the strange shrinking sensation he had felt in the small of his back, the impulse to turn around, the starting of his heart at each footfall behind him, now disappeared. It was quiet at Gibbs's; the place was in perfect order; in the window by the door, under the bill which pictured two pugilists, the big cat he had seen now and then slinking about the place was curled in sleep; and two little kittens were playing near her.
At one of the tables, his head bowed in his hands, was the wreck of a man Archie had so often seen in that same attitude and in that same place--the table indeed seemed to be used for no other purpose. Gibbs himself was there, in shirt-sleeves, leaning over the evening paper he had spread before him on his bar. He was freshly shaven, and was reading his paper and smoking his cigar in the peace that had settled on his establishment; his shirt was fresh and clean; the starch was scarcely broken in its stiff sleeves, and Archie was fascinated by the tiny red figures of horseshoes and stirrups and jockey caps that dotted it; he had a desire to possess, some day, just such a shirt himself. At the approaching step of the two men, Gibbs looked up suddenly, and the light flashed blue from the diamond in the bosom of his shirt. Curly jerked his head toward the back room. Gibbs looked at Curly an instant and then at Archie, a question in his glance.
"Sure," said Curly; "he's in." Then Gibbs carefully and deliberately folded his paper, stuck it in one of the brackets of his bar, and went with the two men into the back room. There he stood beside the table, his hands thrust into his pockets, his cigar rolling in the corner of his mouth, his head tilted back a little. Archie was tingling with interest and expectation.
"Well," said Gibbs, in an introductory way.
Curly was unbuttoning his waistcoat; in a moment he had drawn from its inner pocket a package, unwrapped it, and disclosed the sheets of fresh new stamps, red and green, and stiff with the shining mucilage. He counted them over laboriously and separated them, making two piles, one of the red two-cent stamps, another of the green one-cent stamps, while Gibbs stood, squinting downward at the table. When Curly was done, Gibbs counted the sheets of postage stamps himself.
"Just fifty of each, heh?" he asked when he had done.
"That's right," said Curly.
"That's right, is it?" Gibbs repeated; a shrewdness in his squint.
"Yes," Curly said.
"Sixty per cent.," said Gibbs.
"All right," said Curly.
"I can't give more for the stickers just now," Gibbs went on, as if the men were entitled to some word of explanation; "business is damned bad, and I'm not making much at that."
"That's all right," said Curly somewhat impatiently, as one who disliked haggling.
"That goes with you, does it, Dutch?" Gibbs said to Archie.
"Sure," said Archie, glancing hastily at Curly, "whatever he says goes with me all right." And then he smiled, his white teeth showing, his face ruddier, his blue eyes sparkling with the excitement he felt--smiled at this new name Gibbs had suddenly given him.
Curly had thrust his hand into another pocket meanwhile, and he drew out another package, done up in a newspaper. He laid this on the table, opened it slowly, and carefully turning back the folds of paper, disclosed the bundle of charred bank-notes. Gibbs began shaking his head dubiously as soon as he saw the contents.
"I can't do much with that," he said. "But you leave it and I'll see."
"Well, now, that's all right," said Curly, speaking in his high argumentative tone; "I ain't wolfing. You can give us our bit later."
"All right," said Gibbs, and carefully doing up the parcels, he took them and disappeared. In a few moments he came back, counted out the money on the table--ninety dollars--and then went out with the air of a man whose business is finished.
Curly divided the money, gave Archie his half, and they went out. The bar-room was just as they had left it; the wreck of a man still bowed his head on his forearms, the cat was still curled about her kittens.
Gibbs had taken down his paper, and resumed his reading.
"I'm going to get a bath and a shave," Curly said. He passed his hand over his chin, rasping its palm on the stubble of his beard. Archie was surprised and a little disappointed at the hint of dismissal he felt in Curly's tone. He wished to continue the companionship, with its excitement, its interest, its pleasure, above all that quality in it which sustained him and kept up his spirits. He found himself just then in a curious state of mind; the distinction he had felt but a few moments before in the back room with Gibbs, the importance in the success of the expedition, more than all, the feeling that he had been admitted to relationships which so short a time before had been so mysterious and inaccessible to him,--all this was leaving him, dying out within, as the stimulus of spirits dies out in a man, and Archie's Teutonic mind was facing the darkness of a fit of despondency; he felt blue and unhappy; he longed to stay with Curly.
"Look at, Dutch," Curly was saying; "you've got a little of the cush now--it ain't much, but it's something. You want to go and give some of it to your mother; don't go and splash it up in beer."
It pleased Archie to have Curly call him Dutch. There was something affectionate in it, as there is in most nicknames--something reassuring.
But the mention of his mother overcame this sense; it unmanned him, and he looked away.
"And look at," Curly was going on, "you'll bit up on that burned darb; you be around in a day or two."
Curly withdrew into himself in the curious, baffling way he had; the way that made him mysterious and somewhat superior, and, at times, brought on him the distrust of his companions, always morbidly suspicious at their best. Archie disliked to step out of Gibbs's place into the street; it seemed like an exposure. He glanced out. The summer twilight had deepened into darkness. The street was deserted and bare, though the cobblestones somehow exuded the heat and turmoil of the day that had just passed from them. Archie thought for an instant of what Curly had said about his mother; he could see her as she would be sitting in the kitchen, with the lamp on the table; Gusta would be bustling about getting the supper, the children moving after her, clutching at her skirts, retarding her, getting in her way, seeming to endanger their own lives by scalding and burning and falling and other domestic accidents, which, though always impending, never befell. The kitchen would be full of the pleasant odor of frying potatoes, and the coffee, bubbling over now and then and sizzling on the hot stove--Archie had a sense of all these things, and his heart yearned and softened.
And then suddenly he thought of his father, and he knew that the conception of the home he had just had was the way it used to be before his father lost his leg and all the ills following that accident had come upon the family; the house was no longer cheerful; the smell of boiling coffee was not in it as often as it used to be; his mother was depressed and his father quarrelsome, even Gusta had changed; he would be sure to encounter that lover of hers, that plumber whom he hated. He squeezed the roll of bills in his pocket; suddenly, too, he remembered his new revolver and pressed it against his thigh, and he had pleasure in that. He went out into the street. After all, the darkness was kind; there were glaring and flashing electric lights along the street, of course; the cheap restaurant across the way was blazing, people were drifting in and out, but they were not exactly the same kind of people in appearance that had thronged the streets by day. There was a new atmosphere--a more congenial atmosphere, for night had come, and had brought a change and a new race of people to the earth--a race that lived and worked by night, with whom Archie felt a kinship. He did not hate them as he was unconsciously growing to hate the people of the daylight. He saw a lame hot-tamale man in white, hobbling up the street, painfully carrying his steaming can; he saw cabmen on their cabs down toward Cherokee Street; he saw two girls, vague, indistinct, suggestive, flitting hurriedly by in the shadows; the electric lights were blazing with a hard fierce glare, but there were shadows, deep and black and soft. He started toward Cherokee Street; he squeezed the money in his pocket; he was somehow elated with the independence it gave him. At the corner he paused again; he had no plan, he was drifting along physically just as he was morally, following the line of least resistance, which line, just then, was marked by the lights along Market Place. He started across that way, when all at once a hand took him by the lapel of his coat and Kouka's black visage was before him. Archie looked at the detective, whose eyes were piercing him from beneath the surly brows that met in thick, coarse, bristling hairs across the wide bridge of his nose.
"Well," said Kouka, "so I've got you again!"
Archie's heart came to his throat. A great rage suddenly seized him, a hatred of Kouka, and of his black eyes; he had a savage wish to grind the heel of his boot heavily, viciously, remorselessly into that face, right there where the eyebrows met across the nose--grinding his heel deep, feeling the bones crunch beneath it. For some reason Kouka suddenly released his hold.
"You'd better duck out o' here, young fellow," Kouka was saying. "You hear?"
Archie heard, but it was a moment before he could fully realize that Kouka knew nothing after all.
"You hear?" Kouka repeated, bringing his face close to Archie's.
"Yes, I hear," said Archie sullenly, as it seemed, but thankfully.
"Don't let me see you around any more, you--"
Archie, saved by some instinct, did not reply, and he did not wait for Kouka's oath, but hurried away, and Kouka, as he could easily feel, stood watching him. He went on half a block and paused in a shadow. He saw Kouka still standing there, then presently saw him turn and go away.
Archie paused in the shadow; he thought of Kouka, remembering all the detective had done to him; he remembered those forty days in the workhouse; he thought of Bostwick, of the city attorney, of the whole town that seemed to stand behind him; the bitterness of those days in the workhouse came back, and the force of all the accumulated hatred and vengeance that had been spent upon him was doubled and quadrupled in his heart, and he stood there with black, mad, insane thoughts clouding his reason. Then he gripped his roll of money, he pressed his new revolver, and he felt a kind of wild, primitive, savage satisfaction,--the same primitive satisfaction that Kouka, and Bostwick, the city attorney, the whole police force, and the whole city had seemed to take in sending him to the workhouse. And then he went on toward the tenderloin.
III
Gibbs, never sure that the police would keep their word with him, rose earlier than usual the next morning, ate his breakfast, called a cab--he had an eccentric fondness for riding about in hansom-cabs--and was driven rapidly to the corner of High and Franklin Streets, the busiest, most distracting corner in the city. There the enormous department store of James E. Bills and Company occupied an entire building five stories high. The store was already filled with shoppers, mostly women, who crowded about the counters, on which all kinds of trinkets were huddled, labeled with cards declaring that the price had just been reduced. The girls behind the counters, all of whom were dressed in a certain extravagant imitation of the women who came every day to look these articles over, were already tired; their eyes lay in dark circles that were the more pronounced because their cheeks were covered with powder, and now and then they lifted their hands, their highly polished finger-nails gleaming, to the enormous pompadours in which they had arranged their hair. Many of the women in the store, clerks and shoppers, wore peevish, discontented expressions, and spoke in high ugly voices; the noise of their haggling filled the whole room and added to the din made by the little metal money-boxes that whizzed by on overhead wires, and increased the sense of confusion produced by the cheap and useless things which, with their untruthful placards, were piled about everywhere. The air in the store was foul and unwholesome; here and there pale little girls who carried bundles in baskets ran about on their little thin legs, piping out shrill numbers.
Gibbs was wearied the moment he entered, and irritably waved aside the sleek, foppish floor-walker. The only person to whom he spoke as he passed along was a private detective leaning against one of the counters; Gibbs had already had dealings with him and had got back for him articles that had been stolen by certain women thieves who were adept in the art of shoplifting. Gibbs went straight back to the elevator and was lifted out of all this din and confusion into the comparative quiet of the second floor, where the offices of the establishment occupied a cramped space behind thin wooden partitions.