He was a short, black-browed man, who walked with a bow-legged roll. The short sleeves of his jacket displayed sinewy, bronze wrists with anchors tattooed upon them. His neck rose out of his low-cut mariner's shirt like the neck of a brown, fighting bull, and his black eyes, set deep under bushy, frowning brows, were red, like those of a bull that is dangerous. He had been taken with a drunken passion for her, and though, when he kissed her, his upper lip scraped her face like a file, though his incessant grip of her hands hurt her, and though his heavy foot, seeking hers beneath the saloon-table, nearly crushed her own, she had to answer him with the professional smile. "I dunno where I'll sleep," she said. "I guess Lee Hung's Letty'll put me up." The sailor chucked her pointed chin so roughly that she thought her neck would crack. "Why don't you come along o' me?" he inquired. "Where's that?" "To one o' our places. I know a beauty, an' I'll take good care o' you, an' afterward you can stay on." "One of your places? What's those?" "Places we visit. Places for seafarin' men. I tells you I knows a daisy--Big Lou's keepin' it--an' they needs a new gal there, for I stopped in as I come ashore this evenin' an' they tole me the one I knew after last voyage was buried only yesterday." Mary shuddered. "Is it all right?" she asked. "All right? Course it's all right. But mind you,"--his black eyes leaped into a sudden threat--"I'm takin' you to-night. No philanderin'. For this night y'er my gal." She looked away. "Mind you that," he drunkenly repeated. "I'm mostly as gentle as Nathan's lamb, but when I'm tricked I'm ready with my hands. It's all right. It's a good place for a good time. Plenty to drink an' the best o' company. Better come. I can fix it so's you can get a steady job there." She shivered again, but she could not see why she should shiver. After all, she was glad to learn of any place where she would be sure of food to eat and a roof to cover her--and so she came to Summerton's. XXIX THE DOORS OF THE SHADOW It is a winding and tortuous way across Greenwich Village to Summerton's. The mazed course runs through streets that squirm like worms between a fisherman's fingers; it skirts cobbled courts that are in twilight at midday and damp in the longest drought; it turns and doubles up passages that seem blind, dodges through the very bones of tumble-down warehouses, storehouses, houses so ramshackle that the imagination can conjure no possible use for them, and it comes out at last into a foul thoroughfare that appears to be no better than a stinking alley, so close to the water's edge that the masts of the river's cluttered craft look as if they grew upon the dirty, sagging roofs opposite, and so near to the wharves that the green walls of the buildings are wet and odorous as if from a continuous application of bilge-water.