Trotter opened his door and listened. Then he tiptoed out to the
stairhead. The coast seemed clear. The house lay beneath him as
still as a well. It was nothing more than a three-tiered cavern
of quietness.
So he crept back to his own room and closed and locked the door
after him. It was a top-floor rear, where a hip-roof gave his
back wall the rake of a Baltimore buckeye, and a dismantled
electric call-bell bore ignominious testimony to the fact that
his skyey abode had once been a servant's quarters.
But the room was quiet, and, what counted more, it was cheap. The
thought of ever being put out of it terrified the frugal-minded
Trotter. For seven weary months he had wandered about New York's
skyline, looking for just the right corner, as peevish as a
cow-bird looking for a copse nest.
Yet Mrs. Teetzel's laws were adamantine. Her rule was as
Procrustean as her thin-lashed eyes were inquisitive. She daily
inspected both her lavishly distributed lambrequins and her
"gentleman roomers'" mail, with an occasional discreet excursion
into their unlocked trunks. Cooking in a bedroom was as illicit
as private laundry work in the second-floor bathtub. A young
Toronto poet who had learned the trick of buttering an envelope
and in it neatly shirring an egg over a gas jet was first
reminded that he was four weeks behind in his rent and then sadly
yet firmly ejected from the top-floor skylight room.
So Trotter, once back in his own quarters, moved about with a
caution not untouched with apprehension. Mrs. Teetzel, he knew
had a tread that was noiseless. She also had the habit of
appearing, in curl-papers, at uncouth moments, as unheralded as
an apparition from the other world. And Trotter's conscience was
not clear. For months past he had kept secreted in his trunk one
of those single-holed gas heaters known as a "hot plate." This he
surreptitiously attached to the gas jet, and secretly thereon
made coffee and cooked his matutinal hard-boiled egg. There was a
thrill of excitement about it, a tang of outlawry, a touch of
danger. It took on the romance of a vast hazard. And it also
rather suited his purse, since that particular newspaper office
which he had journeyed to New York both to augment and to uplift
showed no undue haste in receiving him.
His third and last assault on the Advance office, in fact, had
amounted to an unequivocal ejection. Three short questions from
the shirt-sleeved autocrat of that benzine-odored bedlam had led
to Trotter's undoing. He wasn't expected to know much about
newspaper work, but before he came bothering people he ought at
least to know a shadow of something about the city he was living
in! And the one-time class orator of the University of Michigan
was calmly and pointedly advised to go and cut his eyeteeth on
the coral of adversity. He was disgustedly told to go out and
make good, instead of coming round and bothering busy people.
And Trotter went meekly out. But he had not made good.
He drifted hungrily about the great new city, the city that
seemed written in a cipher to which he could find no key. He even
guardedly shadowed the resentful-eyed Advance reporters on their
morning assignments, to get some chance inkling of the magic by
which the trick was turned. He wandered about the river front and
the ship wharves and the East Side street markets. He nosed
inquisitively and audaciously about anarchists' cellars and
lodging-houses; he found saloons where for a nickel very
palatable lamb stew could be purchased; he located those
swing-door corners where the most munificent free lunches were on
display; he dipped into halls where Socialistic fire-eaters
nightly stilettoed modern civilization; he invaded ginmills where
strange and barbaric sailors foregathered and talked. From all
this he was not learning Journalism. He was, however, learning
New York.
But now he had struck luck--sudden and unlooked for--in the
humble creation of "rhyme-ads" for a Sixth Avenue furniture
store. So, having his Bohemian young head somewhat turned by his
first check of twenty dollars, he had promptly celebrated his
return to affluence by as promptly spending a goodly portion of
that wealth. He had bidden a cadaverous animal painter named
Mershon and two equally hungry-eyed Michiganders yclept Albright
to his room with the rakish back wall, where the feast had been a
regal if somewhat subdued one.
And now Trotter looked about the room, thoughtfully, and decided
it was time to act. All record of this past orgy would have to be
wiped out. The window, he knew, was impossible, for already there
had been divers complaints as to the mysterious showers of
eggshell which day by day fell into the area below.
So Trotter laid several newspapers together. On these outspread
newspapers he placed four empty beer bottles, a sardine can, odds
and ends of biscuit and zwieback, a well-scraped wooden butter
tray, and--what had troubled and haunted him most, from the
moment of its purchase in a Sixth Avenue delicatessen store--the
lugubrious and clean-picked carcass of a roast turkey.
It had been a fine turkey, and done to a turn. But all along
Trotter had been wondering just how he was going to get rid of
those telltale bones. At the merriest moments of the feast the
question of the corner in which they could be secreted or the
aperture out of which they could be thrust had hung over him like
a veritable sword of Damocles.
But now he knew there was only one way to solve the problem. And
that was to wrap the remains carefully together, tie them up, and
make his escape down through the quiet house into the midnight
street. There the ever-damnatory parcel could be casually dropped
into a near-by ash barrel or tossed into a refuse can, and he
could aimlessly round the block, like a sedentary gentleman
enjoying his belated airing.