He was immediately perceived and the crowd with a single voice shouted
him a welcome. Through the shifting gossamer of smoke that filled the
room he distinguished many familiar faces.
"Come over here, old man," he heard some one call, and turned. He stared
without sign of recognition at a young man, who, with many gestures,
indicated a vacant chair at a near-by table. He saw the smoke, the
waiters gliding noiselessly through it, the littered floor, the wet,
glistening table-tops. These misty details he saw mistily, as one sees
things in a dream.
His face was pale; there were unfamiliar lines about his mouth, and an
unnatural glitter was in his eyes.
He saw the dancer, a man of age who wore the clothes of a laborer, fling
himself heavily upon a frail chair at the nearest table, across which he
leaned unsteadily, wagging his head and muttering incoherently.
Adams strode over to him and laid a hand upon his shoulder.
"Come," he said, quietly.
With an effort the man balanced his head and lifted his heavy eyes.
"Come," Adams repeated.
It was as though the youths at the other tables knew it to be a
psychological moment. The noise subsided. Every eye in the room was
intent upon Adams, strong in his splendid youth, and the man beside whom
he stood and who was weak in his age.
Adams was seen to encircle the man's shoulders with one arm and fairly
lift him from the chair. On his feet he was unsteady. Adams supported
him to the door of the restaurant, which swung back noiselessly as the
ill-mated couple disappeared.
Then were exchanged many glances among those who had watched the little
play in silence.
"What's he going to do with the old guy?" some one asked.
A general, half-forced laugh of relief ensued, which broke the tension,
and immediately the company relapsed into its previous state of
conviviality. The songs were resumed. The noise developed swiftly and
the strangely incongruous incident of Adams' disappearance with the
drunken moulder was forgotten straightway.
No one even took the trouble to go to a window to see if developments
had occurred outside. And if one had been thus sufficiently interested,
he would merely have observed Adams hail a passing cab, into which, as
it drew up at the curb, he thrust the man, hesitating an instant with
his hand on the door to mutter a certain address to the cabman leaning
from his box.
The driver touched his horse, and the vehicle swung into Woodward
Avenue. Of a sudden, from the dark patch of pavement that the restaurant
faced, Adams felt himself flung into a maelstrom of light.
The façades of two theatres were all a-glitter; an immense confectionery
across the street was ablaze, and, looking down at the pavement through
the window in the cab door, Adams noted the weird, distorted reflections
in the asphalt ooze that gives the city streets at night the uncertain
quality of a looking-glass wantonly smeared with pitch.
He blinked in the yellow glare of the street illumination. It was as
though he were passing through a tunnel of brilliance. A car whirred by,
with clanging gong. He caught a fleeting, swift glimpse of the several
passengers.
As the cab proceeded, his attention was attracted now and then to groups
of young men loitering at various corners as though in contemplation of
some deed, very secret, if not very terrible. The lilting chorus of a
college song that he recognized was brought to him in the noiselessly
rolling cab. Before the last store-lights in the business district were
passed, he had obtained such an impression of the city as he had never
had before.
Through the window in the door he saw the skeleton trees in Grand Circus
Park as the cab cut the circle of its area, and he shivered at the
prospect of the winter they suggested.
A sound very close to him caused him to start. He smiled, looked down,
and the smile went out of his eyes and left them cold and hard.
The man beside him had succumbed to the comfort of the cab, and, asleep,
was snoring gently. Passing beneath an electric lamp, the light fell an
instant on his face--pale beneath the stubble beard and the splotches
of grime. His knees were high and his hands, broad, work-hardened, lay
limp upon them.
Adams turned again to the window.
The cab was passing through a residence district now. He noted with a
shifting, vague interest, the houses--big, shapeless for the most part,
and set far back in broad yards. The lights in the lower stories glared
yellow like the earth-close eyes of crouching monsters.
Suddenly Adams pulled himself together. He began to experience a
livelier interest in the dark picture of the street, with its broad
curbs, its iron fences, dark hedges, and wide yards. He pressed his face
against the window in the cab door, and now and again twisted his neck
to gaze as far back down the street as the swift motion of the vehicle
would permit.
He remembered definitely, vividly, certain landmarks of his young
boyhood, as he was whirled on, noiselessly, save for the rythmic
_clackety-clack_ of the horse's hoofs on the echoing asphalt. There was
the house from the side yard of which he had once, as a tiny lad, stolen
a great armful of roses. There, again, was the house with the smoke tree
near the porch behind which Pauline, his little sister, and he had once
hidden until the policeman passed, indolently swinging his night stick.
Adams smiled at the recollection.
The cab came opposite a tall apartment house at the junction of a
cross-town car line. On the ground now occupied by the ungainly,
rambling pile of stone, he remembered vividly, had stood, when he was a
very small boy--hardly big enough to push his cart--a little shack
occupied by an old cobbler, deserted in his age by a son who had robbed
him. Very many were the hours he had spent in that little shop. He
recalled certain of those hours with a momentary pang of sadness. The
cobbler had been a soldier in Poland, in his time, and was wont to tell
great stories of his own valor, to which the yellow-headed lad, all
forgetful of his mission and his cart, had listened wide-eyed and
open-mouthed. The memory came swift and certain and distinct in detail
and in the richness of it Adams shrank from the ugly stone pile in
passing, as though it were a horrid thing thus to thrust itself upon a
young man's memory of his little boyhood.
As he dreamed thus the cab turned a corner, suddenly. The rich
residential thoroughfare vanished like the palace in the pantomime, and
Adams, his face still close to the glass, saw a row of little, squat,
mean houses, set regularly behind low white picket fences. Only here and
there a light shone from small, square windows. The street seemed
totally deserted, save for a single dog that he saw crawl under one of
the low latched gates and vanish behind a house that was like all the
others in the little squalid street. And as he noted these things, the
cab pulled up before such another house, and, mechanically, he passed
his hand over his forehead, as a child does when awakened.
A brief parley ensued with the burly driver of the cab, comical in his
bristling fur cape.
"Kin yeh git 'im out?" he asked.
"Yes."
One of the windows in the second story of the cottage before which the
cab had stopped, was aglow, and across the drawn shade a shadow passed,
and passed again.
Adams shook the sleeper in the cab. Finally after a series of muffled
grunts and grumblings that were like remonstrances, the man was gotten
out.
"All right?" inquired the driver, gathering up the reins.
"All right," Adams replied; whereat the driver spoke to his horse,
turned, and drove back down the squalid street.
Adams supported the tottering figure of the man to the door of the
house and fumbled for the knob, which, when his fingers found it, turned
in his hand and the door swung open. On a table in the room at the end
of the narrow, bare, unlighted hallway, stood a lamp, turned low. As he
half carried, half led the man into the room, Adams heard footsteps
overhead. And as he cast his burden down upon a carpet-covered lounge,
pushed back against the wall at the further end of the room, he heard a
voice from above call:
"Iss dat you?"
"Come down," he answered.
There was a little frightened, feminine "Oh!" followed by quick, heavy
footfalls on the bare stairs. The next instant the short, thick figure
of a woman was framed by the doorway. The light of the lamp struck her
face which was broad and kindly.
"Chon!" she exclaimed.
His eyes met hers and he smiled faintly. Then his gaze wandered to the
lithograph of the Christ tacked to the wall, and to the couch beneath,
and he said:
"There's father; I brought him home."
The woman uttered a little cry and bent over the prostrate figure.
"Ah," she muttered. Then, glancing back over her rounded shoulder, she
asked: "Where you git heem?"
"Down town," the boy replied, quietly.
"So." And the woman sat down again, and as long as her son was with her
she kept her eyes upon him, oblivious, seemingly, of the unfeeling body
on the couch.
"Ven you come in?" she asked.
"This morning," he replied. "I played football to-day."
"Och, yes," she murmured, nodding. "I heard dee noise. Yes."
There ensued a moment's silence that was complete, save for the heavy
breathing of the sleeper on the couch.
"Chon," the woman said, calmly, "you don't do dat?" And she indicated
with a gesture the prone shape on the lounge.
The boy laughed forcedly, and shook his head.
"No," he said.
"Och, yes, no," his mother muttered.
"How's Pauline?" he asked.
"She's vell; she's to a dance."
He shivered as with cold.
"Isn't it late?" he asked.
"No," his mother replied. "She be home maype a hour; maype two hour."
Each seemed conscious of the infinite labor of the conversation.
"Well," John said after half an hour, "I guess I'd better be going."
"So soon!" his mother exclaimed. "Vy not in de morning? We go to church,
you ant me."
He shook his head, sadly.
"No," he said. "I must go back to-night. The train leaves before long."
"All right," she muttered.
At the gate in the low fence he turned. His mother's figure was
silhouetted against the light of the room at the end of the hall.
"Good-bye," he said, "and tell Pauline to take care."
"Goot-pye," she called to him softly.
She turned back into the house at once and he heard the door shut.
Passing beneath an electric light he examined his watch. The train was
due to leave in an hour. He decided to walk to the station. The cold
felt good on his face.
He straightened his shoulders and walked with long, even strides,
looking neither to right nor left.
He found Janet waiting in the shadow of the baggage-room doorway. The
station was thronged with a shouting, jostling crowd. Taking her arm,
he guided her through the gate and assisted her to the platform of the
last coach.
"You hold the seat, will you?" he asked. "I want to smoke. We broke
training to-night, you know."
She nodded, smiling.
And until the porter's call he paced up and down the long train shed. As
the train pulled out he swung himself to the platform of the rear coach
and entered.
V
A throng of several hundred awaited the arrival of the train at midnight
in the railway yards. At the first shriek of the whistle away beyond the
bend of the river the cheering commenced. It gathered force sufficiently
to smother completely the pounding of the great engine as it thundered
past the trim little station and came to a grinding stop.
In the crowd that packed the platform the old men were as eager as the
lads; and there were not a few such old men with white in their hair and
lined faces, that the lights of the station made radiant. Professors
were there, eagerly jostling, squirming, edging in the crowd, holding
their own in the tight-squeezed mass with elbows every whit as pointed
as the elbows of the youngsters that the youngsters thrust into _their_
sides.
The crowd discovered at once that the team was in the second coach and
before a man of the eleven had reached the platform the car was
surrounded.
Late as was the hour, speeches were demanded, nor was a path opened
through the throng until the demand had been acceded to. A circle formed
around the band and its brassy noise blared out upon the night until
every townsman within range of the farthest-carrying horn flung up his
window and poked a head wonderingly into the outer darkness.
As the crowd surged down the platform to the front of the train, Adams,
taking advantage of the clear way at the rear, assisted Janet to the
ground and unobserved they passed out into the street through the tall
turnstile in the shadow of the baggage-room.
She breathed deeply of the cool night air and he felt the pressure of
her hand upon his arm as her steps quickened to his.
In the crowded train she had refrained from all attempts to learn the
reason for his silence. Only now and then, as in answer to some question
that she asked him, had he spoken in the hour and a half required to
cover the forty miles between Detroit and Ann Arbor.
But now in the silence of the darkened street she took courage. At the
top of the steep hill, as they passed beneath a sputtering electric
lamp, she looked up at him and asked:
"What is it, John--tell me--what is it?"
She hung upon his reply eagerly, a little frightened, though she
realized, in seeking to analyze her foreboding that she could not tell
herself why she should.
"There's a great deal, Janet," he replied calmly. She perceived an
unfamiliar note in his voice, a note that seemed to her to sound a sort
of resignation.
"But _what_---- Can't you tell me? Has anything happened?"
For a moment he did not answer, but then he said: "Yes, dear; several
things have happened--several things----"
"What?" she asked, almost in a whisper, and he felt her hand's pressure
upon his arm again.
He continued, ruminatively, quite as though she had not spoken: "Several
things, that make other things clearer to me now--much clearer."
She had never heard him speak like this before. Perhaps it was a matter
intimately personal with him, too intimately personal even for her to
share his knowledge, his consideration of it. She almost regretted
having asked him. Why had she not prattled on about the game, the
splendid victory, his own skill? But when next he spoke she understood
she had done no wrong.
"I must tell you about those things, Janet; I must tell you
now--to-night--I have meant to before."
Her hand upon his arm tightened its grasp.
"John, what _is_ it? _What_ has happened?" Now she made no effort to
conceal the fright that sounded in her voice.
He patted her hand, white on his black sleeve, and laughed
lightly--forcedly, she thought.
"There, don't be afraid," he said, "I haven't committed any crime."