With never a backward glance he ran on, not doubting as a hare before
the beagle, but following a straight course, like unto a hunted roebuck.
He did not know he could run so fast, and he could not have run so fast
any other time than this. Beyond was a crossing. It was blind instinct
that made him double round the turn. And it was instinct, quickened and
guided by desperation, that made him dart like a rose-tinted flash up
the steps to the stoop of an old-fashioned residence standing just
beyond the corner, spring inside the storm doors, draw them to behind
him, and crouch there, hidden, as pursuit went lumbering by.
Through a chink between the door halves he watched breathlessly while
Switzer, who moved with a pronounced limp and rubbed his knees as he
limped, hobbled halfway up the block, slowed down, halted, glared about
him for sight or sign of the vanished fugitive, and then misled by a
false trail departed, padding heavily with a galoshed tread, round the
next turn.
With his body still drawn well back within the shadow line of the
overhanging cornice Mr. Leary, coyly protruded his head and took visual
inventory of the neighbourhood. So far as any plan whatsoever had
formed in the mind of our diffident adventurer he meant to bide where he
was for the moment. Here, where he had shelter of a sort, he would
recapture his breath and reassemble his wits. Even so, the respite from
those elements which Mr. Leary dreaded most of all--publicity,
observation, cruel jibes, the harsh raucous laughter of the
populace--could be at best but a woefully transient one. He was not
resigned--by no means was he resigned--to his fate; but he was helpless.
For what ailed him there was no conceivable remedy.
Anon jocund day would stand tiptoe on something or other; Greenwich
Village would awaken and bestir itself. Discovery would come, and forth
he would be drawn like a shy, unwilling periwinkle from its shell, once
more to play his abased and bashful role of free entertainer to
guffawing mixed audiences. For all others in the great city there were
havens and homes. But for a poor, lorn, unguided vagrant, enmeshed in
the burlesque garnitures of a three-year-old male child, what haven was
there? By night the part had been hard enough--as the unresponsive
heavens above might have testified. By the stark unmerciful sunlight; by
the rude, revealing glow of the impending day how much more scandalous
would it be!
His haggard gaze swept this way and that, seeking possible succour where
reason told him there could be no succour; and then as his vision pieced
together this outjutting architectural feature and that into a coherent
picture of his immediate surroundings he knew where he was. The one bit
of chancy luck in a sequence of direful catastrophes had brought him
here to this very spot. Why, this must be West Ninth Street; it had to
be, it was--oh joy, it was! And Bob Slack, his partner, lived in this
identical block on this same side of the street.
With his throat throbbing to the impulse of new-born hope he emerged
completely from behind the refuge of the storm doors, backed himself out
and down upon the top step, and by means of a dubious illumination
percolating through the fanlight above the inner door he made out the
figures upon the lintel. This was such and such a number; therefore Bob
Slack's number must be the second number to the eastward, at the next
door but one.