THE STORY OF KID McDUFF'S GIRL
The back room of the saloon on the northwest corner of Pell Street and the
Bowery is never cheery on the brightest day. The entrance to the dives of
Chinatown yawns just outside, and in the bar-room gather the vilest of the
wrecks of the Bend and the Sixth Ward slums. But on the morning of which I
speak a shadow lay over it even darker than usual. The shadow of death was
there. In the corner, propped on one chair, with her feet on another, sat
a dead woman. Her glassy eyes looked straight ahead with a stony,
unmeaning stare until the policeman who dozed at a table at the other end
of the room, suddenly waking up and meeting it, got up with a shudder and
covered the face with a handkerchief.
What did they see, those dead eyes? Through its darkened windows what a
review was the liberated spirit making of that sin-worn, wasted life,
begun in innocence and wasted--there? Whatever their stare meant, the
policeman knew little of it and cared less.
"Oh! it is just a stiff," he said, and yawned wearily. There was still
half an hour of his watch.
The clinking of glasses and the shuffle of cowhide boots on the sanded
floor outside grew louder and was muffled again as the door leading to the
bar was opened and shut by a young woman. She lingered doubtfully on the
threshold a moment, then walked with unsteady step across the room toward
the corner where the corpse sat. The light that struggled in from the
gloomy street fell upon her and showed that she trembled, as if with the
ague. Yet she was young, not over twenty-five; but on her heavy eyes and
sodden features there was the stamp death had just blotted from the
other's face with the memory of her sins. Yet, curiously blended with it,
not yet smothered wholly, there was something of the child, something that
had once known a mother's love and pity.
"Poor Kid," she said, stopping beside the body and sinking heavily in a
chair. "He will be sorry, anyhow."
"Who is Kid?" I asked.
"Why, Kid McDuff! You know him? His brother Jim keeps the saloon on
---- Street. Everybody knows Kid."
"Well, what was she to Kid?" I asked, pointing to the corpse.
"His girl," she said promptly. "An' he stuck to her till he was pulled for
the job he didn't do; then he had to let her slide. She stuck to him too,
you bet.
"Annie wasn't no more nor thirteen when she was tuk away from home by the
Kid," the girl went on, talking as much to herself as to me; the policeman
nodded in his chair. "He kep' her the best he could, 'ceptin' when he was
sent up on the Island the time the gang went back on him. Then she kinder
drifted. But she was all right agin he come back and tuk to keepin' bar
for his brother Jim. Then he was pulled for that Bridgeport skin job, and
when he went to the pen she went to the bad, and now----"
Here a thought that had been slowly working down through her besotted mind
got a grip on her strong enough to hold her attention, and she leaned over
and caught me by the sleeve, something almost akin to pity struggling in
her bleary eyes.
"Say, young feller," she whispered hoarsely, "don't spring this too hard.
She's got two lovely brothers. One of them keeps a daisy saloon up on
Eighth Avenue. They're respectable, they are."
Then she went on telling what she knew of Annie Noonan who was sitting
dead there before us. It was not much. She was the child of an honest
shoemaker who came to this country twenty-two or three years before from
his English home, when Annie was a little girl of six or seven. Before she
was in her teens she was left fatherless. At the age of thirteen, when she
was living in an East Side tenement with her mother, the Kid, then a young
tough qualifying with one of the many gangs about the Hook for the
penitentiary, crossed her path. Ever after she was his slave, and followed
where he led.
The path they trod together was not different from that travelled by
hundreds of young men and women to-day. By way of the low dives and
"morgues" with which the East Side abounds, it led him to the Island and
her to the street. When he was sent up the first time, his mother died of
a broken heart. His father, a well-to-do mechanic in the Seventh Ward, had
been spared that misery. He had died before the son was fairly started on
his bad career. The family were communicants at the parish church, and
efforts without end were made to turn the Kid from his career of wicked
folly. His two sisters labored faithfully with him, but without avail.
When the Kid came back from the Island to find his mother dead, he did not
know his oldest sister. Grief had turned her pretty brown hair a snowy
white.
He found his girl a little the worse for rum and late hours than when he
left her, but he "took up" with her again. He was loyal at least. This
time he tried, too, to be honest. His mother's death had shocked him to
the point where his "nerve" gave out. His brother gave him charge of one
of his saloons and the Kid was "at work" keeping bar, with the way to
respectability, as it goes on the East Side, open to him, when one of his
old pals, who had found him out, turned up with a demand for money. He was
a burglar and wanted a hundred dollars to "do up a job" in the country.
The Kid refused, and his brother came in during the quarrel that ensued,
flew into a rage, and grabbing the thief by the collar, threw him into the
street. He went his way shaking his fist and threatening vengeance on
both.
It was not long in coming. A jewelry store in Bridgeport was robbed and
two burglars were arrested. One of them was the man "Jim" McDuff had
thrown out of his saloon. He turned State's evidence and swore that the
Kid was in the job too. He was arrested and held in bail of ten thousand
dollars. The Kid always maintained that he was innocent. His family
believed him, but his past was against him. It was said, too, that back of
the arrest was political persecution. His brother the saloon-keeper, who
mixed politics with his beer, was the under dog just then in the fight in
his ward. The situation was discussed from a practical standpoint in the
McDuff household, and it ended with the Kid going up to Bridgeport and
pleading guilty to theft to escape the worse charge of burglary. He was
sentenced to four years' imprisonment. That was how he got into "the pen."
Annie, after he had been put in jail, went to the dogs on her own account
rather faster than when they made a team. For a time she frequented the
saloons of the Tenth Ward. When she crossed the Bowery at last she was
nearing the end. For a year or two she frequented the disreputable houses
in Elizabeth and Hester Streets. She was supposed to have a room in
Downing Street, but it was the rarest of all events that she was there.
Two weeks before this morning, Fay Leslie, the girl who sat there telling
me her story, met her on the Bowery with a cut and bruised face. She had
been beaten in a fight in a Pell Street saloon with Flossie Lowell, one of
the habitues of Chinatown. Fay took her to Bellevue Hospital, where she
"had a pull with the night watch," she told me, and she was kept there
three or four days. When she came out she drifted back to Pell Street and
took to drinking again. But she was a sick girl.
The night before she was with Fay in the saloon on the corner, when she
complained that she did not feel well. She sat down in a chair and put her
feet on another. In that posture she was found dead a little later, when
her friend went to see how she was getting on.
"Rum killed her, I suppose," I said, when Fay had ended her story.
"Yes! I suppose it did."
"And you," I ventured, "some day it will kill you too, if you do not look
out."
The girl laughed a loud and coarse laugh.
"Me?" she said, "not by a jugful. I've been soaking it fifteen years and I
am alive yet."
The dead girl sat there yet, with the cold, staring eyes, when I went my
way. Outside the drinking went on with vile oaths. The dead wagon had been
sent for, but it had other errands, and had not yet come around to Pell
Street.
Thus ended the story of Kid McDuff's girl.