"He's a friend of mine--it's all right. If he comes in, just tell him a certain party was asking for him. Tell Dan, too. I've just got home--just done my bit."
But even this distinction, all he had to show for his year in prison, did not impress the bartender as Archie thought it should. He drew from his waistcoat pocket a dollar bill, carefully smoothed it out, and tossed it on to the bar.
"Give us a little drink. Here, Dad," he said to the old convict, "have one." The old man grinned and approached the bar. "Never mind him,"
said Archie in a confidential undertone, "he's an old-timer."
The old convict had lost the middle finger of his right hand in a machine in the prison years before, and now, in his imbecility, he claimed the one compensation imaginable; he used this mutilation for the entertainment of his fellows. If any one looked at him, he would spread the fingers of his right hand over his face, the stub of the middle finger held against his nose, his first and third fingers drawing down the lower lids of his eyes until their whites showed, and then wiggle his thumb and little finger and look, now gravely, now with a grin, into the eyes of the observer. The old convict, across whose sodden brain must have glimmered a vague notion that something was required of him, was practising his one accomplishment, his silly gaze fixed on the bartender.
When the bartender saw this his face set in a kind of superstitious terror.
"Don't mind him," said Archie; "He's stir simple."
The bartender, as he set out the whisky, was reassured, not so much by the patronage as by Archie's explanation that he had just come from prison. He had been at Danny Gibbs's long enough to know that a man is not to be judged solely by his clothes, and Archie, as a man reduced to the extremity of the garb the state supplied, might still be of importance in their world. While they were drinking, another man entered the saloon, a short, heavy man, and, standing across the room, looked, not at Archie and Dad, but at their reflections in the mirror behind the bar. Archie, recognizing a trick of detectives, turned slightly away. The man went out.
"Elbow, eh?" said Archie.
"Yep," said the bartender. "Cunningham."
"A new one on me. Kouka here yet?"
"Oh, yes."
"Flyin'?"
"Yep."
"Well," said Archie, "give 's another. I got a thirst in the big house anyway--and these rum turns." He smiled an apology for his clothes.
They drank again; then Archie said:
"Tell Dan I was here."
"Who shall I say?" inquired the bartender.
"Dutch."
"Oh, yes! All right. He'll be down about one o'clock."
"All right. Come on, Dad," said Archie, and he went out, towing his battered hulk of humanity behind him. At the corner he saw Cunningham with another man, whom he recognized as Quinn. When they met, as was inevitable, Quinn smiled and said:
"Hello, Archie! Back again?"
"Yes," said Archie. He would have kept on, but Quinn laid a hand on his arm.
"Hold on a minute," he said.
"What's the rap?" asked Archie.
"Well, you'd better come down to the front office a minute."
Cunningham had seized the old man, and the two were taken to the Central Police Station. They were charged with being "suspicious persons," and spent the night in prison. The next morning, when they were arraigned before Bostwick, the old man surprised every one by pleading guilty, and Bostwick sentenced him to the workhouse for thirty days. But Archie demanded a jury and asked that word be sent to his attorney.
"Your attorney!" sneered Bostwick, "and who's your attorney?"
"Mr. Marriott," said Archie.
The suggestion of a jury trial maddened Bostwick. He seemed, indeed, to take it almost as a personal insult. He whispered with Quinn, and then said:
"I'll give you till evening to get out of town--you hear?"
Archie, standing at attention in the old military way, said:
"Yes, sir."
"You've got to clear out; we don't want you around, you understand?"
"I understand, sir."
"All right," said Bostwick.
After Archie had bidden good-by to the old convict, who was relieved to get back to prison again, and after he had been photographed for the rogues' gallery--for his confinement and his torture had made him thin and so changed his appearance and his figure that his Bertillon measurements were even more worthless than ever--he was turned out.
Archie, thus officially ordered on, was afraid to go back to Gibbs's, and when he went out of the Central Station that Saturday morning he turned southward into the tenderloin. He thought it possible that he might find Curly at some of the old haunts; at any rate, he might get some word of him.
The morning was brilliant, the autumnal sun lay hot and comforting on his back, and there was a friendliness in the hazy mellow air that was like a welcome to Archie, the first the world had had for him. Though man had cast him out, nature still owned him, and a kind of joy filled his breast. This feeling was intensified by the friendly, familiar faces of the low, decrepit buildings. Two blocks away, he was glad to see the old sign of Cliff Decker's saloon, with the name painted on the window in crude blue letters, and, pictured above it, a preposterous glass of beer foaming like the sea. More familiar than ever, was old man Pepper, the one-eyed, sitting on the doorstep as if it were summer, his lame leg flung aside, as it were, on the walk before him, his square wrinkled face presenting a horrid aspect, with its red and empty socket scarcely less sinister than the remaining eye that swept three quarters of the world in its fierce glance. On another step two doors away, before a house of indulgence frequented only by white men, sat a mulatto girl, in a clean white muslin dress, her kinky hair revealing a wide part from its careful combing. The girl was showing her perfect teeth in her laugh and playing with a white poodle that had a great bow of pink ribbon at its neck. Across the street was Wing Tu's chop-suey joint, deserted thus early in the day, suggesting oriental calm and serenity.
On the other corner was Eva Clason's place, and thither Archie went. He had some vague notion of finding Curly there, for it was Eva who, on that morning, now more than a year ago, in some impotent, puny human effort to stay the fate that had decreed him as the slayer of Benny Moon, had tried to give Curly a refuge.
The place wore its morning quiet. The young bartender, with a stupid, pimpled face, was moping sleepily at the end of the bar; at Archie's step, he looked up. The step was heard also in the "parlor" behind the bar, revealing through chenille portieres its cheap and gaudy rugs and its coarse-grained oaken furniture, upholstered in plush of brilliant reds and blues. One of the two girls who now appeared had yellow hair and wore a skirt of solid pink gingham that came to her knees; her thin legs wore open-work stockings, her feet bulged in high-heeled, much-worn shoes. She wore a blouse of the same pink stuff, cut low, with a sailor collar, baring her scrawny neck and the deep hollows behind her collar bones. In her yellow fingers, with a slip of rice paper, she was rolling a cigarette. The other girl, who wore a dress of the same fashion, but of solid blue gingham, splotched here and there with starch, was dark and buxom, and her low collar displayed the coarse skin of full breasts and round, firm neck. The thin blonde came languidly, pasting her cigarette with her tongue and lighting it; but the buxom brunette came forward with a perfunctory smile of welcome.
"Where's Miss Clason?" Archie asked.
"She's gone out to Steve's," said the brunette. The thin girl sank into a chair beside the portieres and smoked her cigarette. The brunette, divining that there was no significance in Archie's visit, and feeling a temporary self-respect, dismissed her professional smile and became simple, natural and human.
"Did you want to see her?" she asked.
"Yes, I'm looking for a certain party."
"Who?"
"Well, you know him, maybe--they call him Curly; Jackson's his name."
The girl looked at Archie, exchanged glances with the bartender; and then asked:
"You a friend o' hisn?"
"Yes, I just got home, and I must find him."
"Oh," said the girl, wholly satisfied. She turned to the bartender.
"Was Mr. Jackson in to-day, Lew? He's around, in and out, you know.