Jacqueline of Golden River | Page 2

was a six-foot hole under the eaves.
I had arranged to leave the next day, and a storage company was to call in the morning for my few sticks of furniture. I had half planned to take boat for Jamaica. I wanted to think and plan.
I had nobody dependent on me, and was resolved to invest my little fortune in such a way that I might have a modest competence, so that the dreadful spectre of poverty might never leer at me again.
The Eskimo dog was growing uneasy. It would run from me, looking round and uttering a succession of short barks, then run back and tug at my overcoat again. I began to become interested in its manoeuvres.
Evidently it wished me to accompany it, and I wondered who its master was and how it came to be there.
I stooped and looked at the collar. There was no name on it, except the maker's, scratched and illegible. I rose and followed the beast, which showed its eager delight by running ahead of me, turning round at times to bark, and then continuing on its way with a precision which showed me that it was certain of its destination.
As I crossed Madison Square the light on the Metropolitan Tower flashed the first quarter. Broadway was in full glare. The lure of electric signs winked at me from every corner. The restaurants were disgorging their patrons, and beautifully dressed women in fine furs, accompanied by escorts in evening dress, stood on the pavements. Taxicabs whirled through the slush.
I began to feel a renewal in me of the old, old thrill the city had inspired when I entered it a younger and a more hopeful man.
The dog turned down a street in the Twenties, ran on a few yards, bounded up a flight of stone steps, and began scratching at the door of a house that was apparently empty.
I say apparently, because the shades were down at every window and the interior was unlit, so far as could be seen from the street; but I knew that at that hour it must contain from fifty to a hundred people.
This place I knew by reputation. It was Jim Daly's notorious but decently conducted gambling establishment, which was running full blast at a time when every other institution of this character had found it convenient to shut down.
So the creature's master was inside Daly's, and it wished me to get him out. This was evidence of unusual discernment in his best friend, but it was hardly my prerogative to exercise moral supervision over this adventurous explorer of a chillier country even than his northern wastes. I looked in some disappointment at the closed doors and turned away.
I meant to go home, and I had proceeded about three paces when the lock clicked. I stopped. The front door opened cautiously, and the gray head of Jim's negro butler appeared. Behind it was the famous grille of cast-steel, capable, according to rumour, of defying the axes of any number of raiding reformers.
Then emerged one of the most beautiful women that I had ever seen.
I should have called her a girl, for she could not have been more than twenty years of age. Her hair was of a fair brown, the features modelled splendidly, the head poised upon a flawless throat that gleamed white beneath a neckpiece of magnificent sable.
She carried a sable muff, too, and under these furs was a dress of unstylish fashion and cut that contrasted curiously with them. I thought that those loose sleeves had passed away before the nineteenth century died. In one hand she carried a bag, into which she was stuffing a large roll of bills.
As she stepped down to the street the dog leaped up at her. A hand fell caressingly upon the creature's head, and I knew that she had one servant who would be faithful unto death.
She passed so close to me that her dress brushed my overcoat, and for an instant her eyes met mine. There was a look in them that startled me--terror and helplessness, as though she had suffered some benumbing shock which made her actions more automatic than conscious.
This was no woman of the class that one might expect to find in Daly's. There was innocence in the face and in the throat, uplifted, as one sees it in young girls.
I was bewildered. What was a girl like that doing in Daly's at half past twelve in the morning?
She began walking slowly and rather aimlessly, it seemed to me, along the street in the direction of Sixth Avenue. My curiosity was unbounded. I followed her at a decent interval to see what she was going to do. But she did not seem to know.
The girl looked as if she had stepped out of a cloister