# Ainslee's Magazine/'Hucksterin' for Yours, Grogan'

Extracted from Ainslee's, Nov 1913, pp. 56–65. Title illustration may be omitted.
“Hucksterin' For Yours, Grogan”
$^{BY}$ REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN
MRS. GROGAN sniffed disdainfully. She had a mug of coffee halfway to her broad mouth, and she sniffed so mightily that some of the hot liquid was blown out of the mug, and splashed on her red right hand. Mrs. Grogan, however, was pachydermatous.
“You're a peach of a burglar, you are!” said she.
The pleasantry was addressed to her better half; but her better half would have appeared, to any less prejudiced observer, to deserve the import of the words without the irony of the tone in which they were uttered.
With his great shoulders hunched over the coverless kitchen table, the light of the kerosene lamp full upon his knobby face, “Lefty” Grogan looked as if he were indeed the dangerous man that his circle of friends unanimously acclaimed him to be. His forehead was low on one side and high on the other, because a ragged and barren scar, running from a point above his right eyebrow halfway to the top of his round poll, provided a patch of desert cuticle at the borders of which even his rank, black hair stopped in abrupt despair. Around the brief line that one might draw from his jutting lower jaw and his bushy brows, his features had been battered in or scooped out as if some careless sculptor, finding that he had allowed himself too little space properly to complete his work, had refused to remodel the clay and crowded in the remaining details with a certain anger at the insensate material. Lefty's lips were thin and cruel; his nose was as blunt as that of Beethoven—who possessed to perfection one of the types of noses that criminologists call 'criminal'—and his eyes, which looked at you out of. caverns with the green glare of a wild beast, were at once shifty and ferocious.
“Aw, g'on!” said Lefty.
Mrs. Grogan was quite willing to go on. She was both the mental and the physical equal of her spouse—some said that, with her sledge-hammer fists, her blacksmith arms, and her hundred and eighty pounds of hard flesh, she was even his physical superior—and she feared no man.
“A peach of a burglar!” she repeated, her broad, pock-pitted face dully aglow. “When I was drivin' the cart along the crosstown streets, an' you was ringin' basement bells an' askin' did they want any veg'tables, we was sure of twenty dollars a week, an' sometimes twenty-five. That's what we got huckst'rin'; but now——”
“It's the high cost of livin',” said Lefty, fidgeting. “We couldn't begin to do it now. These here combynations of capital has raised the cost of livin' so high——”
Mrs, Grogan's lightning eyes shot him with a cold, blue flash.
“That we could ask more now to the peck than we'd 'a' dared to ask a year ago,” she supplied.
“Our truck 'd cost us twicet as much, Molly.”
“Then what'd stop us from chargin' twicet an' a half times as much?” Her wide mouth tightened. “Anyway,” she said, “nowadays, you get scared off or near caught at every second house you have a try at breakin' into; when you make a haul an' a get-away the stuff turns out two-thirds plated ware; the fences cheat you on the turnover; an' if we make a hundred we're lucky—an' won't make no more for seven weeks.”
“Molly——”
“Listen to me a minute!” interrupted Molly, with an imperious gesture with a fork that held aloft a generous mouthful of fried ham. “That fresh teacher sent home a note to-day that Genevieve's feet was near barefooted; little Jimmy's pants has so many patches in their patches that I'm 'most ashamed to send him to school. We used to buy extra-fresh eggs; then it was fresh eggs; an' now it's just eggs we're eatin'. The week's rent's two days overdue, an' our credit's no good with the janitor. How'd you expect me to keep house an' bring up a family when my man's no better at his job than you are?”
“But, Molly——”
“I said for you to listen to me a minute——”
“The kids——” Lefty's shifty eyes glanced toward the door leading to the two rooms that completed the Grogans' suite of apartments.
“They're sound asleep,” Molly assured him, “an' couldn't hear with the door closed if they wasn't. I want to have my say, an' it's this: If you can't do better'n you been doin', you better trot down to city hall an' renew your huckst'rin' license. You knowed huckst'rin', Grogan, but you don't know your new business, an' it looks to me like you can't learn. I know you can't learn.” The Grogans' kitchen-dining room having the virtue of compactness, she did not have to rise from the table to reach the stove, and she now grasped the coffeepot without so much as turning in her place. “If you was any good at the t'ing, I wouldn't mind so much,” she concluded; “but if you was any good, you'd crack one of these here houses where your combynations of capital lives. It's huckst'rin' for yours, Grogan.”
Something like a smile twisted Lefty's lips.
“For half an hour,” he said, “that's just what I been tryin' to tell you I was goin' to do to-night.”
“Back to huckst'rin'?” Mrs. Grogan's voice was so large that it filled all the space that their two big bodies left in the little room. “I didn't know you had that much sense!”
“Huckst'rin'? Not on your life!” said Grogan, with the scorn that every man who rises in the world has for the business on the shoulders of which he has risen to a more respected business. He was disgusted with his wife's suggestion, and when he was disgusted his face looked even more evil than it usually did. “I mean I'm goin' to show you a t'ing or two. I mean I'm goin' to let you see whether I'm a bum guy or not. I mean I'm goin' to tap a real oil well to-night.”
His wife snorted again.
“Seems to me I've heard you say that on more nights than this one, but our oil bill at Yingler's grocery hasn't shrunk none yet.”
“This here's the real t'ing.”
“They was all that—before you tried 'em.”
Lefty slammed the table with his mighty palm. The heavy china danced.
“I tell you I know what I'm talkin' about this time,” he said. “The place is a regular gold mine.”
“Sure it is, Grogan; an oil well an' a gold mine together. Fif' Av'nue's a Cripple Creek. But can you get in the shaft, an' once you're in it, can you get out again, an' get out with the goods?”
Under the weight of his message, Lefty's voice fell to a croaking whisper.
“It's the Anthony house,” he said.
“Sounds like a hotel. You wouldn't be tryin' to rob a whole hotel, would you, Grogan?”
“You women!” said Grogan. “You make me tired. you women do! Why don't you read the papers?”
“Because we're too busy darnin' our husbands' socks. That's why.”
“You ought to know who Anthony is, anyway—C. N. Anthony—Charley Anthony, the Western guy that made ten millions in copper, an' 's just come East to the big town to spend it. They say his wife's got a million in jewels—an' she don't bank 'em; she wears 'em.”
Mrs. Grogan was not impressed.
“Most likely she banks the real ones, an' wears paste copies. They mostly do, you used to say.”
“Not her. I tell you she's from the West. These here Anthonys wants to make a hit in N' York, an' wearin' all those diamonds an' emeralds an' t'ings is one of their ways of doin' it.”
“He'll have a detective boardin' with him, then.”
“Not him. He's got only the regular lot of servants. I found that out,” said Lefty, with a gleam of professional pride, “by buyin' a drink for the cook.”
“What?” cried Mrs. Grogan. She lowered her head as if she were about to charge across the table at her husband. 'Buyin' drinks for ladies, are you? I see now why you like the burgl'in' business!”
“Aw, shut up, Molly! The cook's a man, an' only a French one at that.”
“P'ff!” said Mrs. Grogan.
“That's straight, Molly.”
“Well, then, I'll bet this copper fellow has the place filled full of burglar alarms.”
“Chere's one window ain't wired.”
“Learned that from the parlor maid, I guess; or got it from the man cook, too, did you?”
Mrs. Grogan was still openly suspicious.
“No, I didn't; I got that for myself. I learned it same's I got wise to the plan an' layout of the whole house. Molly, it's the Sturtivants' house—he's rented it from them, old Anthony has—the house had to make that quick getaway from t'ree mont's an' more back.”
“That's an unlucky house for you, Grogan; you near got your head shot off there, an' you didn't bring a cent away from it, not one.”
“I learned the house, anyhow, an' that done me a good turn.'
“You worked the front door that you got the butler to leave open.”
“I know it, but I took a look around after I got in, an' I found the wirin' out of order around one of the windows on the ground floor. It's a hundred-to-one shot nobody else's noticed it an' had it fixed.”
This sounded rather promising. In spite of her poor opinion of her husband's abilities in his new profession, Molly Grogan showed a mild, a very mild, interest.
“An' you really know the place?” she asked.
“In the dark.”
“Sure?”
“Sure I'm sure.” Lefty gathered up the knives and forks from the table, brushed the greasy plates aside, and, with a splendid importance, began to devise a rough plan of the millionaire's dwelling. “This here,” said he, placing a knife at right angles with the table edge, “is the alleyway at the back of the house—the fence's a ten-footer, an' spiked, but I've done it before just for practice. This fork's a path up the yard. Here where this spoon is's the kitchen.” He indicated the rear of the ground floor. “Now, the window mean's in the drawin'-room——”
“The what?”
The drawin'-room, Now——”
“Is he an artist, too, this fellow Anthony
“No. A drawin'-room,” explained the scornful Lefty, “is a swell guy's wife's parlor. Gimme another fork, will you? That's it. This here fork's the drawin'-room, an' right here——”
Mrs. Grogan's gaze left the diagram, and wandered about her own kitchen.
“Drawin'-room,” she said. “An' look at this! If we'd stuck to huckst'rin' I might 'a' had a drawin'-room myself by now. How many people live in the Anthony joint?”
“The coachmen an' chauffeurs lives over the garage an' stable—that's back here by this here knife; they're out of the way. The dish slingers an' dusters an' the cook an' the bell hops is all safe at the top of the house.”
“Any dawgs?”
“Two, but I've made friends with 'em.”
“Who's in the family?”
“The old man an' his wife an' son. They've got a couple of daughters, but they're kids away at school.”
“How old's the son?”
“Fellow about twenty-five—son of the old man's first wife. But he's all right, the son is; he don't generally come home sober. Now, you see, all I got to do is to come up here by this here knife——”
Molly, however, was finding her imagination too severely tried. In spite of the faint interest that Lefty had awakened in her, she could not long see kitchens in a spoon and drawing-rooms in forks. She yawned heavily and rose.
“You talk too much with your mouth, Grogan,” she said. “That's what's the matter with you. What you want to do's to do somethin'. I'll believe you when you come back here with the goods.”
Grogan rose also. He went to the cupboard, and, from behind the largest dish on the top shelf, drew forth a jimmy, a glass cutter, a revolver, and an electric torch. He examined the revolver to make certain that it was loaded and in repair, and he snapped the torch to assure himself that its battery did not require recharging. Then he slipped all four implements of his trade into the capacious side pockets of his coat. He nodded darkly at his wife.
“I'll show you,” he said. “You'll see. Just you watch out.”
“I will watch out,” said Molly; “an' I got good eyes. I've heard you say all this often enough before, an' mighty little I've seen for it afterward.”
The reiterated complaint twanged Lefty's nerves, tough as those nerves usually were. He strode up to his wife, and laid a heavy hand on her shoulder.
“You'd give a saint the jumps, you would,” he declared. “I've a good mind to shake some sense into you!”
His eyes shone; the scar on his forehead stood out white against a reddened skin ridged with risen veins; his face was malevolent.
Mrs. Grogan moved back a pace, but she was unperturbed. She crooked her elbows, and rested her red fists on her wide hips.
“Shake me?” she boomed. “I'd like to see you try it! Shake me! I'll tell you one t'ing, you white-livered welsher—if you haven't got the nerve to pull off this deal to-night—if you don't come back here with the goods—I'll shake you. I'll shake you with these two hands, an' I'll shake my job, an' I'll take the kids an' clear out. You get the goods, or else I bounce you, or else we go back to huckst'rin'. See?”
II.
A nicely calculated spring took Lefty from the top of the fence at the rear of the Anthony house to the soft turf of the grassplot. There for a moment he crouched, listening.
Two dogs barked—once each; but the wind, as the intruder had foreseen, was blowing from his direction toward the kennels, and the barks were low, because the dogs recognized an acquaintance. It was a favorably dark night, and the light from the alley lamp-post did little to brighten it. In the darkness, Lefty presently heard the soft pad of feet, and a cold muzzle was thrust into his face, while the second animal sniffed at his patting hand. The two great Danes were safe.
Lefty unlaced and drew off his brogans. He hung them by their knotted strings about his neck. Then, with the dogs noiselessly following, he, as noiseless as the dogs, made his way over the grass, paralleling the path, and so passed by the side of the house until he stood under the unshuttered window that presented his highest hope of ingress.
He rose on his tiptoes. By so doing he could just reach the spot in the pane behind which he knew the lock lay. He produced his glass cutter, and, working as speedily as caution allowed, drew a semicircle on the pane in front of the lock. Three times he drew it. That accomplished, he restored the cutter to his pocket, and lowered himself to a more natural position, in order to rest before removing that semicircle of glass. Such a removal is ticklish business, for the glass must not be permitted to fall and sound a bell-like alarm; the trick requires a hand not unsteadied by the throbbing of the nerves that comes from long standing a-tiptoe.
When he straightened to the task, Lefty's hands were steady. He pressed, with his right thumb, the top of the glass arc gently inward, and held his left hand ready to seize the base of the severed crystal when the pressure should tip it outward; but, just as the severed section gave way, one of the great Danes brushed against Lefty's legs. He started ever so slightly, and the glass fell on the inside of the window. It fell upon the parquet floor with a tinkle that, even to the burglar's scarcely sensitive soul, sounded loud enough to wake the dead.
Lefty dropped on his knees below the window, and huddled against the wall. With all his powers of hearing, he listened. The dogs sniffed in friendliness at his face, and one wagging tail beat across his eyes. Their breathing and his own made it hard for him to listen.
“Shut up!” he whispered savagely.
He waited, motionless, for a full quarter of an hour, but he could detect no further sound from the house. The entire building was dark and still.
Very slowly Lefty rose and passed a hand through the opening that he had cut in the windowpane. His fingers touched the bolt beyond.
Now was the crucial instant. If the faulty wiring had been discovered and repaired, an alarm would sound; Lefty might go to jail, or, failing that, he would return home empty-handed, and there certainly be sentenced to a life term at hard huckstering. He twisted the swinging bolt, at first lightly, then heavily. It was all right. It gave easily, and nowhere from within the house came any resulting warning. The broken wires had not been mended.
Lefty quietly raised the window. He vaulted into the dark drawing-room.
There was nothing here to attract him. His plan was the commonplace plan of the every-day—or, rather, the every-night—burglar; he would first visit the dining room; make a bundle of the best and most portable silver; draw this near the open dining-room window through which he had entered; place it close enough to be readily seized, and yet not at a point where, in a hurried retreat, it might be stumbled over; then proceed to the bedroom on the second floor and secure the far more important jewels.
Some members of his profession, he was well aware, differed from him here in a minor detail of tactics; they advocated the leaving of the first bundle outside the house while the second-story work was in progress. They agreed that, in the event of trouble upstairs, this avoided the difficulty of lowering the silver from the window while in flight, and thus—since the silver could be readily seized from the ground in passing—increased the chances of getting away with at least some plunder. Lefty, however, had once had an ugly experience in which an unusually diligent watchman, prowling through a yard, tripped on such a bundle, and made awkward investigations. Lefty was willing to risk the sign of an open window, but he did not want to risk that anything more than
His knowledge of the house, gained during his visit at the the time of the Sturtivants' occupancy stood him now in good stead. Without a sound, and without a mishap, even without the use of his electric torch, held ready in his right hand for purposes either of illumination or defense, he made his way to the large paneled dining room. He was proceeding, still in darkness, to search for a tablecloth in which to wrap the silver that he was soon to collect, when——
The room was flooded with blinding glare of light.
Lefty wheeled, his useless torch raised as if it were a weapon. The door through which he had just passed was closed, but before it, and covering Lefty with a singularly ugly magazine revolver, stood a young man in evening clothes,
“Put down that electric torch,” said the young man quietly.
He was an erect fellow, who bore himself with as much ease while thus confronting a detected burglar as he would evidently have exhibited in crossing a ballroom to ask the most popular débutante for a dance that he knew she had promised to somebody else. His face was pink and white, and adorned with a blond mustache, brushed upward at the ends in the German military mode that was just then being fashionably mimicked in England and America. His features were delicate, though there were signs of dissipation in the slightly puffed cheeks that had been designed for leanness; the tight mouth was firm and the gray eyes hard.
“Put down that torch,” repeated the young man.
Lefty's sullen face did not alter. He placed the torch on the dining table that stood between him and his enemy. Then, as he withdrew his hand, that hand made a rapid dart for the side pocket of his coat in which his own revolver lay.
Only an instant, only the twinkling of an eye, stood between Lefty Grogan and something that would have meant the electric chair, had he had his way with it. But the intruder was too quick for Lefty.
“Hands up!” commanded the young man sharply.
Lefty's hands, still empty, shot above his head.
“You can't try that sort of thing with me,” continued the captor, his voice once more at the low pitch to which it was apparently habitually attuned. “I have lived in a mining camp.”
He smiled, and Lefty thought that the smile was worse than any expression that had preceded it. The young man, still covering his prisoner, came around the table, and went through Grogan's pockets. He secured Lefty's revolver, and satisfied himself that it had no companion,
“You may lower your hands now,” he said, “and you may tell me what you are doing in my father's house at this time of night.”
Lefty's green eyes balefully surveyed the speaker. He was a slim, almost a slight, man. In anything like a fair fight it would have been so easy for Grogan to break Anthony across his knee. The burglar's first impulse was one of hopeless defiance.
“What d' you t'ink I'm doin'?” asked Grogan. “Payin' a party call?”
Anthony smiled again.
“I dare say that was a rather unnecessary inquiry,” he admitted. “The only important question just now is whether I ought to wake the governor and the servants before I telephone for the police.”
The police! Of course, Lefty had at once known that, barring the lucky chance of some careless opening to “rush” his captor, it was all over with him; but this mention of the police somehow made his plight finally vivid. It was patent enough to stir his turgid imagination. He felt the handcuffs on his stout wrists; he heard the clatter of the patrol wagon over the jolting streets; he had a picture of the court-room; he even envisaged the cell in Sing Sing where he would be shut to pass hideous years.
His brutal face changed; his ugly mouth worked.
“You don't mean——” he mumbled.
“Don't I, though?” young Anthony laughed. “You didn't suppose I'd ask you to stay here as our guest, did you?”
Lefty thought of the brawny, pock-pitted Molly, who now assumed in his mind characteristics almost angelic. He thought of the two children, and he wished bitterly two things—he wished that he could go back to the uneventful life of a cheating huckster, which he had so recently hated, and that he could get his stubby fingers around this swell's throat and choke him until that sneering face turned purple.
If Anthony would only lower that gun!
“On the whole,” Anthony was saying, “I think I shall begin by ringing up the servants.”
But he did not lower the revolver; he kept it steadily leveled while he backed toward the door beside which, in the wall, and close to the switch whereby the room had been so fatally illuminated, Lefty saw a small, white bell button, now suddenly portentous.
“Stop!” pleaded Lefty.
Anthony, his hand almost on the button, paused. He looked at Grogan with raised eyebrows and with a face full of polite wonder; but he did not speak,
“For Gawd's sake, don't do it!” continued Lefty.
His fingers itched to lay hold of his tormentor, but his hate was sinking under a flood of self-pity.
“Don't do what?” asked Anthony. “Not ring?”
“Don't have me pinched, Mr. Anthony. Give me another chance!”
It was evident that the young man could not believe his ears.
“I never heard of such nonsense!” he declared.
Lefty stretched out his heavy hands in an equally ponderous appeal.
“Please, Mr. Anthony!” he begged.
“This is impudence,” said Anthony; “sheer impudence! I come home to find you robbing our house; I find you armed and ready to kill me; and simply because I prove myself too quick to let you carry out your plans, you have the presumption to ask me to let you go. You!” He looked at the hulking figure, with its smudged features and sinister mouth a-work. “Why, if I was the district attorney, I should merely submit your face as exhibit A, and rest my case on that. Anybody can see at a glance that you are a hardened criminal.”
There was a good deal of truth in that last statement; it was at any rate certain that most observers would have agreed that Grogan looked like a bad man, and yet Lefty was putting forth a tremendous effort to make his appearance—indeed, to make everything that was his, his pose, his gestures, his voice, his words—plead in his favor. The calmly superior determination, the serene assurance of his captor, froze his soul with fear. His inner ears heard the clang of that cell door, and his heart yearned for the old huckster's cart, for the two complaining children, and for the daily rebukes of Gargantuan Molly, his wife.
The sweat oozed through Grogan's rank hair. It welled across that ragged patch of scar, rolled over his brief forehead, forced its way through his bushy brows, and stung his shifty, green eyes. The bungled nose dilated with sorrow. Lefty tried with his dry tongue to wet his dry lips; he tried to set them to a drooping curve that would indicate something of the anguish that was in his broad breast.
“I ain't,” he said; “I ain't no hardened criminal. Honest, I ain't, Mr. Anthony.”
Because the right hand was growing shaky from its long grasp of the revolver, Anthony shifted his weapon to his left hand. He did not relax his guard, nor did his hard glance soften, yet he did not press that terrible white bell button.
“Do you mean to try to tell me,” he asked, “that you are not a burglar?”
“No, I ain't,” groaned Lefty.
“Then how do you explain your presence here? Tell me that, if you can.”
“I ain't a burglar,” Lefty protested. “At least not by trade nor regular I ain't.” His mind went back to Molly's forcible advice and criticisms—oh, if only he had harkened to those criticisms and followed that advice!—and his accusing memory ran swiftly from his successes as a huckster through the long series of failures that formed the brief chronicle of his more criminal career. “I'm the unluckiest, poorest, bummest sort of a burglar that ever tried the game!” he genuinely sobbed.
Something that looked like amazement passed over young Anthony's face. It was succeeded by the slightest suspicion of a smile totally unlike the smiles that he had thus far vouchsafed.
“This is a queer situation,” he said. He kicked a chair to the table and sat own across the table from Grogan. “Now, don't shout, or you'll have the servants here whether you want them or not; and if you wake my father you may rest assured that he won't wait to hear any fairy tales.” He rested in front of him the hand that still leveled that frightfully watchful revolver. “Proceed, little one; your story interests muh.”
In the whirlpool of his fears, Lefty snatched wildly at a straw. Perhaps, somewhere behind this cruelly thoroughbred face, there was hidden a human quality to which appeal might be made not wholly in vain.
“Mr. Anthony,” he said, keeping his voice at the safe pitch, “I only ask you to listen to the straight goods. I ain't doin' these here t'ings because I want to; I'm doin' them because I can't get no other work.”
“What's your business?” snapped Anthony.
“I'm a taxicab chauffeur,” said Grogan.
He was surprised to find how easy it was to say it.
“The preparatory school,” Anthony declared. “I always suspected it.”
“What say, sir?” asked Lefty.
“I said that you were born and bred for your present line of endeavor.”
“Indeed I wasn't, Mr. Anthony. I was brought up honest, an' I married honest, an' I lived honest till the taxi strike t'ree mont's back. Then, when the strike was called off, I found out the company'd gone an' blacklisted me, an' I couldn't get a job nowheres.”
“Why didn't you go to the Charity Organization Society, or something of that sort?”
Lefty had never heard of the association referred to, but he drew himself up with quick dignity.
“I couldn't bring myself to beg,” said he.
This time Anthony chuckled outright.
“Oh, well,” he said, “there's no accounting for tastes, is there?” He paused a moment, and then looked more serious. “Married?” he inquired.
“That's it!” said Grogan eagerly. “I'm a married man, an' I got four kids. They're the prettiest little curly-headed tots you ever seen, they are; an' there they was, every evenin' when I come home done up by lookin' for work; an' when I come in, they'd set up cryin', the whole four of 'em—though generally they're the best-behaved kids you could want—an' ask me hadn't I got a job, an' why hadn't I brought 'em somethin' to eat.”
“Dear, dear! All four cried?”
“Yes, sir; all four.”
“Must have sounded like a Dutch band. Why didn't your wife go to work?”
Grogan shook his head sadly.
“Couldn't,” said he.
“She had her pride, too, eh?” asked Anthony; but it was clear that he was trying to goad himself into disbelief rather than that he was wholly disbelieving.
Lefty raised a grimy fist to his eyes, and wiped away real tears.
“Not that,” he said. “She was the best little woman in the world, an' one of the prettiest, an' she t'ought the world of me, too. I wisht you could 'a' knowed her then, Mr. Anthony. Whatever I done she always t'ought was right, an' she'd 'a' worked the nails off her pretty fingers for me; but she was always a frail little lady, an' she can't never work no more now.”
“Oh,” said Anthony, in a tone that was at last altered to sincerity. “I'm sorry. You mean she's dead, of course?”
“She's dyin',” said Lefty, very low. “She's got the con.”
“She got the—I beg your pardon, but what did you say was the name of the illness?”
“She's got the consumption.”
He spoke very simply and effectively, and he knew it. He wanted desperately to be free again, and he was so truly sad at the thought of having to part from Molly that this reference to her—albeit the picture that he painted was not precisely realistic—brought a lump into his throat. But, besides all this, the spirit of the creative artist had been suddenly born in Lefty Grogan. He gloried in his new work, gloried with a soaring, sorrowful happiness; he felt, to the point of sobbing, all the poignancy of the situation that his ready words presented, and he dimly realized that he was exulting almost as much in the sheer artistic success of those words as in the prospect that their success might mean his liberty.
They might result in something exceedingly like liberty, for Mr. Anthony now looked grave. He was so grave that he lowered his revolver, and Lefty was so much impressed with his new-found power that he decided to trust to it rather than run the chance of rushing his now less carefully protected captor.
“I'm sorry,” said Anthony again.
Grogan swallowed the lump in his throat, and gained fresh inspiration.
“Of course, she don't know what—what I do,” he murmured. “She t'inks I got a night-watchman job. If she ever found out, it'd kill her.”
That was enough; it was the last touch. Lefty's artistic conscience was of the best, the rarest sort; it was of the sort that knows when to tell its possessor to stop. Grogan remained silent; like a true genius, he knew that he had done a perfect thing, and, having done it, he would add nothing and take nothing away; he would stand or fall by his own judgment.
Mr. Anthony was silent, too. He sat looking in Lefty's direction, but his glance went beyond Lefty. His face was gentle now, and once he nodded his head as if in agreement with some idea of mercy that had entered ut.
“Look here!” he said at last, in a tone even quieter than any he had yet employed. “Are you telling me the truth?”
“If I'm stringin' you,” said Grogan solemnly, “I hope I may——”
“You needn't swear about it. I can see you're not lying.” Anthony stood up. “I dare say I'm a fool,” he went on, “but—— Well, if I let you go, will you promise me never to go in for this kind of thing again?”
What would not Grogan have promised? His face glowed with gratitude until—so great is the power of a fine emotion to transmute even the basest of faces—it was almost a good face. His low voice shook, and his whole huge frame shook also, as he announced:
“You bet I will!”
“Wait a minute,” Anthony persisted. “You may swear about it, after all. Will you swear to me that, as truly as you love your wife and children, you'll never do this again—that you'll ask for charity first—that you'll beg on the streets first?”
Lefty raised a solemn palm toward heaven.
“As sure as I love my wife an' the kids,” vowed Lefty—and he meant it, every word.
Anthony drew from his pocket a handful of bills and loose change.
“Then you can go,” he said. “That's all I've got, and if I go upstairs to get more, I shall be sure to wake the governor, and he'll never let you off.”
III.
Lefty went. He did not stop going until he was deep in the purlieus of the East Side, and there, under a lamp-post, he counted Mr. Anthony's bounty. There was a five-dollar bill, there were three two-dollar bills, and two ones, and there was some silver—in all less than fifteen dollars, a sum considerably short of that which was Grogan's assured weekly profit during the old huckstering days.
“Oh, well,” said Lefty, “I can't kick; I'm lucky to make my get-away.”
He went home to bed, and, as was his custom when he had no success to re port, he did not trouble to rouse his wife, who was snoring heartily.
When he awoke, Molly was shaking him. She held the early edition of an evening newspaper in her free fist, and the afternoon sunlight already poured into their tenement windows.
“Where is it?” she was asking.
“Where's what?” said Lefty, rubbing the sleep out of his green eyes
“The goods,” said Molly. “The diamond tiary an' the ruby rings an' the five-t'ousand emerald necklace belongin' to Mrs. Charles N. Anthony that you cribbed last night.”
Lefty blinked.
“Quit your kiddin',” said he.
“My kiddin'?” Mrs. Grogan's voice rose to a splendid roar. “You quit your kiddin'! Don't you try to hold out on me, Grogan. I know what I'm talkin' about. Look there!”
Lefty read the glaring headlines that she indicated on the first page of that accursed newspaper. They stated, with the sensational brevity of large type, that the Anthony house had been broken into during the previous night, and a small fortune in jewels made safely away with.
Grogan felt the tenement room whirling round him.
“Gimme that!” he said, and snatched the paper.
He read the account in silence. At the end of it, he read:
    From the general nature of the job, the police are certain that it is the work of the English burglar who has twice already been nearly caught by members of households of the socially elect that he has been for months past pillaging. These persons describe him as a man of apparent education and good breeding. Both for that reason, and because of the fact that, in spite of the accurate descriptions furnished, the police have not yet caught him, he has earned for himself the title of “The New Raffles.”
Grogan slowly put down the paper.
“Gee,” he said, “so all he wanted was to shake a pardner, an' not have to divvy up!”
“What are you talkin' about?” demanded Molly.
“I'll tell you,” said Lefty.
He did. The artist was still alive in Grogan, and, though this time he told the truth, he again carried conviction.
Molly heard him out in grim silence. When he had quite finished, she walked over to the bed, on which he still sat, and shook him as if he were a baby.
“I promised I'd shake you, an' I will!” she cried.
His teeth rattled as she made good her word.
“Consumption, have I?” she continued, when she paused to get a fresh hold on his unresisting shoulders. “'A frail little lady!' I'll show you if I've got the consumption or not!”
The words seemed to renew her strength; they certainly resulted in a renewal of Lefty's punishment. His head was nearly shaken from his body.
“You're a peach of a burglar, you are!” she shouted, for the third time within twenty-four hours. “I guess I got to stay with you to tell you to come in when it rains; but, after this, it's huckst'rin' for yours, Grogan, an' no mistake!”
He had not so much as protested. He took his shaking almost gladly, and if he consoled himself at all it was with tender thoughts of that dying wife who had never lived. Yet even amid such thoughts he was loyal in his love for the more heroic Molly.
When she let him go, and he had recovered his breath, he shuffled into his clothes and made for the door.
“Where you goin', Grogan?” Molly growled.
“Why, over to city hall,” said Lefty, surprised that she should ask, “to take out a new huckst'rin' license.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1959, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 64 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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