Comes in to use the telephone now and then."
Archie was relieved.
"Tell him Dutch was in, will you?" he said.
"Sure," replied the girl.
"Maybe he's in at Hunt's," said the thin girl, speaking for the first time.
"I was going there," said Archie.
"I can run in and ask for you," said the brunette, in the kindly willingness of the helpless to help others. "Or, hold on,--maybe Teddy would know."
"Never mind," said Archie, "I'll go in to Hunt's myself."
"I'll tell Mr. Jackson when he comes in," said the brunette, going to the door with Archie. "Who did you say?"--she looked up into Archie's face with her feminine curiosity all alive.
"Dutch."
"Dutch who?"
"Oh, just Dutch," said Archie, smiling at her insistence. "He'll know."
"Oh, hell!" said the girl, "what's your name?"
Archie looked down into her brown eyes and smiled mockingly; then he relented.
"Well, it's Archie Koerner. Ever hear of me before?"
The girl's black brows, which already met across her nose, thickened in the effort to recall him.
"You're no more wiser than you was; are you, little one?" said Archie, and walked away.
He had reserved Hunt's as a last resort, for there, in a saloon which was a meeting place for yeggs, Hunt himself being an old yegg man who had stolen enough to retire on, Archie was sure of a welcome and of a refuge where he could hide from the police for a day, at least, or until he could form some plan for the future.
Hunt was not in, but Archie found King's wife, Bertha Shanteaux, in the back room. She was a woman of thirty-five, very fleshy, and it seemed that she must crush the low lounge on which she sat, her legs far apart, the calico wrapper she wore for comfort stretching between her knees.
She was smoking a cigar, and she breathed heavily with asthma, and, when she welcomed Archie, she spoke in a voice so hoarse and of so deep a bass that she might well have been taken for a man in woman's attire.
"Why, Dutch!" she said, taking her cigar from her lips in surprise.
"When did you get home?"
"Yesterday morning," said Archie. "I landed in with an old con, went up to Dan's--then I got pinched, and this morning Bostwick gave me the run."
"Who made the pinch?"
"Quinn and some new gendy."
"Suspicion?"
"Yes."
"Huh," said Bertha, beginning to pull at her cigar again.
"Where's John?"
"Oh, he went up town a while ago."
"Is Curly here?"
"Yes, he's around. Just got in the other day. What you goin' to do?"
"Oh, I'm waiting to see Curly. I've got to get to work and see if I can't make a dollar or two. I want to frame in with some good tribe."
"Well, Curly hasn't been out for a while. He'll be glad to see you."
"Is Gus with him?"
"Oh, no. Gus got settled over in Illinois somewhere--didn't you hear?
The boys say he's in wrong. But wait! Curly'll show up after a while."
"Well, I'm hipped, and I don't want to get you in trouble, Mrs.
Shanteaux, but if Kouka gets a flash at me, it's all off."
"Oh, you plant here, my boy," she said in a motherly way, "till Curly comes."
The tenderloin awoke earlier than usual that day, for it was Saturday, and the farmers were in town. In the morning they would be busy in Market Place, but by afternoon, their work done, their money in their pockets, they would be free, and beginning at the cheap music halls, they, especially the younger ones, would drift gradually down the line, and by night they would be drinking and carousing in the dives.
Children, pale and hollow-eyed, coming with pitchers and tin buckets to get beer for their awaking elders, seemed to be the first heralds of the day; then a thin woman, clutching her dirty calico wrapper to her shrunken breast, and trying to hide a bruised, blue and swollen eye behind a shawl, came shuffling into the saloon in unbuttoned shoes, and hoarsely asked for some gin. A little later another woman came in to borrow enough oil to fill the lamp she carried without its chimney, and immediately after, a man, ragged, dirty, stepping in old worn shoes as soft as moccasins, flung himself down in a chair and fell into a stupor, his bloodless lips but a shade darker than his yellow face, his jaws set in the rigidity of the opium smoker. Archie looked at him suspiciously and shot a questioning glance at Bertha.
"The long draw?" he said in a low tone, as she passed him to go to the woman who had the lamp.
"Umph huh," said Bertha.
"I thought maybe he might be--"
"No," she said readily. "He's right--he's been hanging around for a month.--Some oil?" she was saying to the woman. "Certainly, my dear."
She took the lamp.
"Where's your husband now?" she asked.
"Oh, he's gone," the woman said simply. "When the coppers put the Silver Moon Cafe"--she pronounced it "kafe"--"out of business and he lost his job slinging beer, he dug out."
Archie, beginning to fear the publicity of midday, had gone into the back room again. Presently Bertha joined him.
"Thought it was up to me to plant back here," he said, explaining his withdrawal. "There might be an elbow."
"Oh, no," said Bertha, in her hoarse voice, picking up the cigar she had laid on a clock-shelf and resuming her smoking, "we're running under protection now. That dope fiend in there showed up two months ago with his woman. They had a room in at Eva's for a while, but they stunk up the place so with their hops that she cleaned 'em out--she had to have the room papered again, but she says you can still smell it. They left about five hundred paper-back novels behind 'em. My God! they were readers! Nothing but read and suck the bamboo all the time; they were fiends both ways. One's 'bout as bad as the other, I guess."