Criminals -- Fiction; Social problems -- Fiction; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918 -- Fiction
"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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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