CHAPTER IV
Inhis new position father was forced to travel much, often leaving me to my own devices for weeks and sometimes months. I was put up at a small boarding house kept by a widow, who had two children. She was over-worked, sickly, and cranky. She had half a dozen boarders. Before he left, father gave me the money I had saved up, and told me to look about for a job.
There was nobody at the hotel that interested me. The widow was always whining and I kept away from her. Her children were too small for company, and I saw nothing of the other boarders except at mealtimes when they ate much and talked little.
The widow gave me a trunkful of books she had taken for a board bill. Among them I found a battered old volume of Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo,” on which I put in many nights. This sharpened my appetite for reading, and I went around secondhand bookstores, and got hold of the D’Artagnan tales and devoured them. Then “Les Misérables,” and on to the master, Dickens. The books so fired me with the desire for travel, adventure, romance, that I wasmiserable most of the time. As my money dwindled I resolved to find a job. I’d ask the landlady for advice.
I found her out in front, scrubbing the steps, red in the face and vicious looking. I told her I was thinking of going to work.
“Well, it’s about time you thought of that,” she snapped, “layin’ around here readin’ and eatin’ up your father’s money. You can get a job just like I did when my husband run off and left me with two brats on my hands. I just started out and asked for it at every place I come to till I got it, that’s all. And you can do it, too, if you got the gizzard.”
I left her and started my search. If there was a job in the city I determined to get it. I went through block after block, store after store, hour after hour. I got mostly “Noes” but some answered pleasantly, taking my name and address. I kept going until one morning I stopped in front of a cigar store—a dead-looking place, no customers. A man was reading a paper spread out on the counter. I went in and put my question to him. When he stood up I saw he was very tall and very thin. He looked sick. I had never seen an eye like his. It attracted me strangely. I could not have described it then, but I can now. It was a larcenous eye. He was very nice, asking many questions. How old was I? Did I ever work before? Where? I handed him Cy’s letter. He read it and asked me more questions. I have never answered so many questions since, except in a police station. At last he quit, and snapping himself together like a man coming out of a trance, he rapped his knuckles on the counter.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, kid. You comedown here at nine o’clock every morning, open this joint up, and stay here till one o’clock. Then I come on and you go off till six in the evening. At six you come on and stay till ten, and call it a day. You can go to work right now. The sooner the better. In a week you will know the prices of the different things as well as I do, and I can leave you by yourself. Your wages will be three dollars a week and all the cigars you can smoke.”
“But I do not smoke.”
“Well, that’s your bad luck, kid, not mine. What do you say? Want to chance the job?”
I got right in behind the counter and he showed me the different cigars, cigarettes, and tobaccos, and told me their prices. In a week I knew all about the “store” and had learned to serve the few customers that came in, and to make change properly. I further learned that the store was but a “front” or blind for a poker game and dice games in the back room, and that I was a part of the “front.” My business was to sweep the place out in the morning, stand behind the counter in case any one wanted a cigar, and to keep an eye out for “new coppers on the beat” in the evening. The job was interesting. I soon came to know the poker players, crap shooters, and dice sharks who brought their victims into the back room to “clean” them. I often spent my afternoons in the back room watching the games and learning the life.
When there was no game, the sharks sat around practicing their tricks and bewailing their bad luck. Sometimes a poker player would show me how to “shuffle up a hand,” or cut the cards at a given place or “go out” with a hand. The dice shakers and crapshooters showed me their favorite “shots.” I was an apt scholar, absorbing everything like a young sponge. “Tex,” my boss (if he had any other name I never heard it), admonished me never to gamble. “Lay away from it, kid; it’s a tough racket. Look at me and my gatherings of forty years. I ain’t got a white quarter to my name; if it was rainin’ soup I couldn’t buy myself a tin spoon, and I’ve got a string of debts longer than a widow’s clothesline.”
Next door to the cigar store there was a small milk depot kept by a man and his wife. I used to go in every day for a glass of milk, and got acquainted with them. He delivered milk around his routes and the wife minded the shop. He was forever complaining about not being able to collect his money from “them women.” “Them women” were women who kept “parlor houses” in the Tenderloin district a few blocks from his milk store. They were good pay, but he could not get away from his work at the right hour to find them.
One day he told me he would pay me well if I would take the bills and go to the places and stay till I got the money. Here was a chance to earn more money, and I grabbed it. I went in and asked Tex, my boss, when would be the best time to call at those places to collect the milk bills.
If Tex had not gathered much of worldly goods in his forty years, he had at least learned something of the habits of “them women.” “I’ll tell you,” he said. “If you go in the morning you’ll find them asleep; in the afternoon they are out riding or shopping; and at night they will be either too busy or too drunk. Take my advice and go about five o’clock in theevening and you will catch them at dinner, or breakfast, or whatever they call it.”
I followed Tex’s advice that evening and collected three bills out of five. The milkman was pleased with my enterprise and gave me a dollar. Thereafter I collected his bills in the Tenderloin. I visited certain places weekly and was paid promptly. The women I met were nice to me, and I saw nothing of the other side of their lives. I worked faithfully at my two jobs, saved my money, and began looking in the store windows for my gray suit and gray hat. My work kept me so busy that I did not read much. Thoughts of travel and adventure were in the back of my mind, but that could wait. I was young; I must have money first. My two old, rusty pistols, almost forgotten now, lay neglected in the bottom of my little valise.
Tex had a “run of luck” and raised me to four dollars a week. I collected more bills for the milkman. Some of them he called “bad bills.” I kept after them persistently and nearly always got the money. The more hopeless the bill, the greater my commission was. I enjoyed going after them. The Tenderloin women were sure pay; and poor families were good, always had the money ready. I called on a tough saloon man, in a dingy little dive, about ten times to collect a two-dollar bill.
One day when I called he was serving several men at his bar, and when he saw me he said: “No use comin’ in here with that bill, kid. I ain’t goin’ to pay it. If your boss comes up here I’ll bust him in the nose. His milk is no good and he’s no good.”
“Mister,” I said, “I know he is no good, but I have to work and want to keep my job. If you knew justhow hard my boss is you would feel sorry for me instead of being angry. He is so hard and no good that he told me if I did not collect your bill of two dollars to-day I need not come to work to-morrow, and that’s why I’m here.”
The customers looked at me. I stood my ground.
“Hell,” said the man, “I didn’t think he was that bad. Here, take the lousy money.”
I hurried back to the milkman. “Here’s Mr. Finucane’s two dollars.”
“How on earth did you ever collect it?”
“Oh, he just got tired and paid me, that’s all.”
“Well, I’ll make you a present of them,” said he handing me the money. “You certainly earned them.”
The following week I called at Madam Kate Singleton’s with my bill. The colored maid who opened the door showed me a seat in the hall and told me to wait. The madam was dressing. I sat there a few minutes and there was a ring at the door. The maid opened it and an excited little man brushed in, followed by two big men who were not a bit excited. As the door was closing I got a glimpse of a policeman in uniform on the steps.
One of the two men spoke to the maid who went upstairs, and in a minute the madam came down. She waved the men into a room off the hall and closed the door. I listened, but they talked too low for me to hear what they were saying. Presently the madam opened the door and called out: “Oh, girls, come downstairs every one of you.” Half a dozen girls appeared as if by magic. They were all brought into the room and the door closed again.
Nobody paid any attention to me. Now I heardloud voices in the room, but so many were talking at once that I could make nothing of it. Then one of the big men came out, went to the front door, opened it, and said to the policeman: “Send Mike around to the back; tell him to let nobody out. I’ll phone for the wagon. We’ll have to take them all to the station. They won’t talk.”
He disappeared into the room. I got up and opened the front door.
“Where are you goin’?” said the policeman.
“I’m going out, if you please.”
“Get back in there, if you please,” he snarled, “and stay there.”
While the officers were waiting for the wagon one of the big men went upstairs and brought down two “guests.” They were about half awake and looked as if they had been on a drunk. They sat down beside me on the settee. One of them fell into a sound sleep and the other sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands on the sides of his head. Neither of them spoke. In a few minutes the wagon arrived. The girls were all ordered to go out and get in it, which they did. Then the two men and I were ordered to do the same. The madam and one of the big men got into a hack that appeared to be waiting and drove away.
The excited little man who had caused all the trouble got into the wagon with the other big man and sat beside him.
When I was being put in the wagon I protested and tried to explain, but the detectives roughly ordered me to shut up. The “harness cop” who had been at the front door went back to his beat. I did not seeanything of Mike, who had been ordered to stay at the back door.
The girls laughed and joked on the way to the station and shouted “rubberneck” at everybody that looked in at the back of the open wagon. The police station was on one corner of Market Square, one of the busiest corners in the city. Hundreds of people were there daily, selling their produce. Their time was about evenly divided between serving their customers and watching the patrol wagon spewing its loads of humanity into the city prison. It seemed to me they were all there as we were unloaded and hurried through a solid lane of them into the police station. Madam Singleton was there before us, and with her was a tall, sharp-looking man, gray and about fifty. I never found out who he was, but he looked like a lawyer.
The madam, the tall man, and the two big men, who were plain-clothes detectives, went to one side, talking earnestly for a minute or two. The rest of us just stood there and waited. One of the detectives went into an office off the big room we were in, and came out at once with a man in uniform he called “captain.” The captain was a big, red-faced, gray-haired, good-natured Irishman. “Well, what’s this all about?” he said, smiling. The detective stepped over to the small, nervous man and said to the captain:
“Captain, this man complains that one of the girls in Kate Singleton’s place took one hundred dollars, two fifty-dollar bills, from him some time last night or this morning. We went down to her place and saw the girl. She denies that she took it.
“We searched her room and couldn’t find it. Thebalance of them don’t know anything, so they say. He wants them all searched. We couldn’t do it there, so we pinched everybody in the house and here they are, ten of ’em, seven women and three men.”
The captain took the little man in hand. “Who are you?” The little man hesitated.
“Come on, out with it. If you want any help here you’ve got to come clean.”
The little man gave him a name. I could not hear it.
“Where are you from?”
“Emporia, Kansas, is my town.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a hog raiser.”
“When did you come to the city?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“What did you come here for?”
“Oh, just to look around.”
The captain smiled. “How much money did you have when you got off the train here yesterday morning?”
“I had two hundred dollars in paper money and some small change.”
“How much have you spent since you arrived here?”
“I spent twenty-five dollars for a suit of clothes and fifteen dollars for an overcoat. I paid a dollar for a room and I spent about five dollars around town.”
“Is that all? Are you sure, now? Think again.”
“Yes, that’s all,” said the hog man.
“You’re a liar,” Madam Singleton said in a cold, level voice. “You gave Julia ten dollars.”
“Now, now, Kate,” said the captain, “don’t getexcited. I’ll take care of this thing all right.” Then to the hog man:
“Guess you forgot about that ten dollars, hey?”
“Yes, I forgot that,” he said meekly.
“All right; now, how much have you in your pockets?”
He took out some bills and counted them. “Forty-five dollars is all I have.”
The captain counted them and returned them. “That’s correct. Now, which girl took your money?”
The man pointed out the youngest girl of the bunch. She was about twenty or twenty-two, a plump girl with a boyish face and lots of black hair. She was pleasant looking, but not pretty, and she did not look as worn and tired as the others.
She looked straight at him but never opened her mouth. The lawyer-looking man said to her: “Julia, did you take that man’s money?”
“No,” she answered.
“Take all these women in and have the matron search them. Madam Singleton, you have no objection to being searched, have you?” smiled the captain.
“None at all, captain, only make it short and sweet. I am losing time and money here.”
They all trooped off to a room down the hall.
An officer came out from behind the desk and searched me and the two drunks. We had no fifty-dollar bills, so he told us to sit on a bench in front of his desk. The lawyer, or bondsman, or fixer, or whatever he was, paced up and down the room nervously. The captain had gone back to his office.
In a few minutes a big, mannish-looking woman with red hands and a tough walk came along.
“Well, what did you find?” said the lawyer.
“Nothing. They didn’t have a hundred dollars among them.”
The lawyer then hunted up the detective and the hog man. The detective got the captain. The matron made her report and the officer who searched me and the other two did the same.
The captain turned to the hog man.
“All these people have been searched and your money has not been found. What do you want to do now?”
“I want that girl locked up. I know she got my money. I know I had two fifty-dollar bills rolled up with my other bills when I went into that house, and when I got to my room I looked at my money and they were gone.”
“How long was it before you got to your room after you left Madam Singleton’s?” asked the lawyer.
“Oh, I walked around for an hour or two.”
“Oh, you did, eh? Why, you probably had your pocket picked on the street.”
The big captain roared out a laugh and said to the lawyer:
“It must have been an Emporia, Kansas, pickpocket. No Missouri dip would take his roll, extract two fifty-dollar bills, and put the rest back in his pocket.”
The lawyer appeared to get angry. “You’ve searched everybody but me.”
He turned to the hog man fiercely. “Do you want me searched?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, I want you searched. You are just the kindof a yap that gets up in the middle of the night and hides his money so carefully that he has to have a policeman find it for him in the morning. Go ahead and search him,” he said to the detective.
“All right, go ahead,” said the hog man.
The detective went through his trousers carefully, placing everything on a counter, then through his vest, then into his inner coat pocket. No money. Then, as an afterthought, just to make a good job of it, he felt in the coat pockets. In the first one was a bag of tobacco, and as he pulled a handkerchief from the last coat pocket two bills fluttered to the floor.
The lawyer stooped, picked up the two bills, looked at them, and handed them to the captain. The hog man’s eyes bulged till they looked ready to fall out of his head. He was making a dry noise down in his throat that sounded like the quack of a duck. The captain handed him the bills.
“Is this your money?” he scowled.
After inspecting the bills and recovering his voice, the hog man said: “Yes, I think it is.”
The lawyer plucked him by the lapel with one hand, and shook the other in his face. “You dirty little swine, get your property off that counter. Get out of here and back to your hog pastures before I have you locked up.”
The dazed and thoroughly crushed victim hastily gathered up his things and went out with them in his hands.
I was pop-eyed with amazement at this swift, smashing reversal of the situation. The two drunks beside me were but mildly interested. Nobody, from the captain down to Julia, the accused, seemed surprised.I could not understand why the whole crowd did not fall on the hog man and tear him to pieces. The captain disappeared into his office. The detective walked out to the sidewalk. The lawyer turned to Kate and the girls, bowing:
“Madam, and ladies, shall we depart?”
“It’s about time,” said the madam in a positive voice. “I’m hungry enough to eat a raw dog.”
They all moved out into the street. I was left on the bench with the two drunks. The detective strolled back in. The desk man pointed to us.
“What will I do with this outfit, Hayes?”
Hayes appeared to be disgusted. “Oh, charge them with drunk.”
“The kid’s not drunk.”
“Vag him then.”
“What were you doing in that joint, anyway?” to me.
“I went in there to collect a milk bill, sir, and was waiting for the money when all this happened.”
“Where is the bill?”
I produced it.
“Do you work for this man?” he asked, after inspecting it.
“Yes, sir.”
“Why in hell didn’t you say so at the start?”
“I tried to, sir, but everybody told me to shut up. The policeman would not let me go out.”
He turned to the drunks and asked them if they had ten dollars to put up for bail to appear in the morning. They had, and the desk man took them into another room. I saw them no more. When he came back, Hayes said:
“Take the kid upstairs: lock him up with George. I’ll find out about him.”
The women were gone, the drunks were out, and I was the only one detained. It looked all wrong to me. The sergeant took me down to the end of the hall and opened an iron door. It was as if he had opened the door to hell. My blood stopped circulating. We stepped inside and he locked the door behind us. Never since, except perhaps in the half dreams of opium, have I been so frozen with horror. We were standing on a balcony overlooking the half basement that served as the city prison. In front of us was a latticework iron door that opened on an iron stairway leading down into the cell house. The cells were built around the four sides of a cement-floored square, and opened into it. It was supper time and pandemonium was on.
The sergeant rapped on the iron door with his heavy keys, trying to attract the attention of some one below. Failing to make himself heard, he told me to stay there till he could get a “trusty” to take me upstairs. He went out the way we came in, and left me locked in between the two doors on the balcony. The cells below had all been thrown open and there were about fifty prisoners in the open space. They seemed to be about equally divided between negroes and whites, of all ages. The air choked me; it was putrid, heavy, and thick with the stench of foul food, foul clothes, foul bodies, and foul sewers. In the farthest corner of the square a gigantic black was standing guard over a huge smoking caldron.
He was shirtless and barefoot. A leather belt supported his overalls, his only clothing. Sweat glintedon his broad back and chest. He was armed with a long-handled ladle which he dished out the “stew” with, or beat back the stronger and more venturesome prisoners who crowded too closely around the caldron.
I saw no jailers or guards. There was no pretense at order. The younger and stronger men shoved and elbowed their way to the big stew pot, snarling and snapping at each other like a pack of starved dogs. Old men and young boys stood around waiting meekly for the strong to be fed first.
The big negro wielded his ladle, filling the tin pans nearest him. Bread was being served from a large box in another spot, but there appeared to be plenty of it and there was no scramble there. Several new-looking prisoners walked about, making no effort to get food. They were “fresh fish,” new arrivals, who had not yet acquired the “chuck horrors,” that awful animal craving for food that comes after missing half a dozen meals.
At last the weaker ones were served. The cursing, shouting, and fighting were stilled. The big negro wheeled his stew pot away and the empty bread box disappeared. Some of the prisoners went into their cells to eat; some sat down outside on the floor, while others ate standing. Some had spoons, others ate with their fingers, sopping at the bottom of the pan with a piece of bread.
The meal was quickly over. The tin pans, unwashed, were thrown into the cells. The young negroes began singing and buck dancing. White men who had been tearing at each other ten minutes before around the big pot were now laughing and talking in a friendly fashion, and everybody lit up a smoke. Theair was so filled with tobacco smoke and steam from the stew that I could barely distinguish forms below.
It was growing dark and gas jets were lighted but gave no light. I heard a rattling of keys; somewhere some one shouted “Inside.” The shadowy forms shuffled into their cells, and there came the tremendous din of iron doors being slammed shut. The prison was locked up for the night.
I do not know how long I had been standing there. Not more than fifteen minutes, but it seemed a lifetime. A trusty prisoner appeared at my side.
“Come on, you.”
I followed him up a short stairway where he opened a door and we went into a short hall with cells on either side. It was directly above the city prison. As we passed down the hall I heard women’s voices; one of them shouted, “Fresh fish, girls.”
Faces appeared at the barred doors. A colored girl, as we passed her cell, said: “Hello, boy, what you-all been doin’?”
At the end of the hall the trusty stopped at a large room with a barred door. I could look inside. The room was well lighted. Newspapers were lying about. I saw two clean-looking cots, a table on which were books and a box of cigars, and a couple of chairs.
A man was pacing up and down the room, smoking. He wore a comfortable-looking pair of slippers and was in his shirt sleeves. He paid no attention to us till the trusty said: “George, the skipper sent up some company for you.”
He turned sharply and came to the door. He was a fine-looking man about forty years of age, wellgroomed, fresh shaven. He was tall. His hair was gray. His face was pleasant to look at. He might have been a doctor or lawyer. I found myself wondering what he could have done to get locked in a jail. He looked at me carefully for a minute. When he spoke his voice was surprisingly pleasant. There was a suggestion of the South in his drawl.
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, kid, but if you are lousy don’t come in here, that’s all.”
The trusty assured George that I was not lousy, that there was no charge against me and I would be out in an hour or two.
I was locked in.
I had no jail manners then, so I just stood at the door with my hat on, intending to wait there till some one came to let me go. All prisoners do that the first time. Presently my companion told me to take my hat off and sit down, and try to be comfortable.
“You may get out in an hour and you may not. You never can tell. You are beginning young. How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“What are you pinched for?”
I told him all about it.
“That’s everyday business here,” he said. “Usually the sucker is a married man and can’t squawk. But when he does squawk, like this one, the only thing to do is to blow back his money. Either the lawyer or one of the girls eased it into his coat pocket. That’s better than returning it to him and admitting that they tried to rob him.
“The whole thing was a stand-in from the captain down. Everybody’s satisfied. The sucker has hismoney, the girls are all out, Kate will charge Julia fifty dollars for the lawyer’s fee, and that ends it.
“You appear to be the only real sucker in the bunch. By God! Those coppers are fierce. They’ll leave you here till you rot. I’ve always said a copper is a copper till you cut his head off.”
He got a tin cup and scraped it across the bars of the door. The trusty bounced in. “Go down and get the desk sergeant.”
I never saw a prisoner get quicker action. The sergeant came at once.
“It’s a rotten shame to keep this kid locked up, Sam. Did you hear his story? Go down and get Hayes and tell him to let him go home. Send a messenger to his boss. I’ve got plenty of money down there; charge it to me.”
The sergeant went out, promising to “look into it right away.” Our cell—it was more like a room—was in a small corridor set apart for the women prisoners’ quarters. Down the hall I could hear them calling to each other and chatting back and forth from their cells. Somewhere a colored woman was singing a mournful dirge about “That Bad Stackalee.” The verses were endless. The point of the song seemed to be that the negro bully, Stackalee, had been killed with “a big forty-four gun over a damned old Stetson hat.” In the most harrowing tones at the end of every verse the singer moaned the sad refrain, “That ba-a-d Stackalee.”
Later I came to know that this song is a favorite among negroes when in great trouble, such as being locked in jail, being double-crossed by a friend, or parting with their money in a dice game. At such timesthirty or forty verses of “Stackalee” invariably restores the laughing good humor and child-like confidence of the wronged one.
We heard a rattling of keys and a door opening. George put the side of his face against the cell door, so he could see down the hall.
“Get your hat, kid; here they are.”
The detective came up with my two bosses—the milkman and Tex, the gambler. The trusty opened the door.
“Out you go,” said the detective, “and the next time you get jammed up say something before you get thrown in. Holler before you’re hurt; that’s my motto.”
I said good-by to my benefactor, George, and thanked him awkwardly. When I met him years after and had a chance to return his kindness, I learned he was a most distinguished criminal; a man who had stolen fortunes and spent them, who had killed a crooked pal, and served many prison sentences.
“Forget it, kid, and don’t let them scare you out of your job. You go right back next week and collect your bills.”
Tex and the milkman escorted me to the cigar store. The evening games had not started when we went into the back room, so I told my story again. The milkman sympathized and promised to raise my commission on the bills. Tex was relieved to learn that I had not mentioned his “store” to the police.
Collection day came around again, and I made my rounds without incident till I got to Madam Singleton’s, the last place. A colored maid, the only person that escaped arrest the week before, opened the door.When she saw me she screamed at the top of her voice:
“Oh, Miss Kate, here’s the pore milk boy.”
“Bring him right up here, Jo, this minute.”
The maid led me upstairs, then down a hall and to the madam’s room. She was in the midst of dressing for the evening, but when I appeared in the door she stopped, kicked a bunch of clothes to one side, came over and, putting her arm around me, led me into the room.
“Well, you poor boy,” she patted my back. “We are ashamed to face you after going off and forgetting you in jail. Julia thought of you about nine o’clock that night, and I sent down word right away about you. They said you were out and gone home. We never expected to see you again. You must have dinner with us. It’s ready now, and Julia wants to apologize to you. Not that it was her fault,” she added quickly. “It was just something that couldn’t be helped. Those men from the country are always—ah—misplacing their money. We are continually having trouble with them.”
She was so charming and friendly and natural, so different from the crabby widow at my boarding house, the only woman I had any contact with, that I found myself wondering if George had not been too severe in judging them.
She went on with her dressing, and I looked about the room curiously. I had a dim recollection of my mother’s room—a plain bed, a bureau, a big rocking-chair, and a rag carpet. I had looked into the widow’s room at the boarding house, too. That was plainer than my mother’s. It had a cheap, single bed; apacking case covered with a sheet, and a cracked mirror propped against the wall served as a bureau. There was a hard-looking chair at the head of the bed. There was no carpet on the widow’s floor.
Madam Singleton’s room had carpets an inch thick, and the biggest, softest bed and the fattest pillows you could imagine. Her bureau was half as large as the bed, but seemed too small for the things piled on it—boxes, bottles, brushes, combs, pieces of jewelry, and a hundred other articles I had never seen and could not guess the use of. Mirrors were everywhere; from where I sat I could see my face, my profile, or my back. A huge trunk, as big as a bungalow it looked, was in a corner. Its top was thrown back and the tray was on the floor. It was piled high with letters and cards and photos of men. The trunk was overflowing with stockings, garters, ribbons, feathers, and soft, silky-looking garments. My eyes strayed into the open door of a closet. It was full of coats and cloaks, long and short, some of fur of different colors, and others of expensive cloth. Wide rimmed and feathered hats hung everywhere, and the carpet was half covered with shoes, slippers, sandals, gloves, and silk dresses. Over everything hung the odor of perfume. Years after I heard Madam Singleton described as a very beautiful woman. When she turned from her mirror, I thought she looked as a queen ought to look.
Tall, straight, dark-haired with big, brave black eyes; warm, full of color, glowing; a dominating woman.
I heard a small bell tinkling downstairs.
“That means dinner, young man. Come with me.”