her for? Was he drunk?"

"No, he was crazy, I tell you--crazy in the head. Thought she was hiding
some money from him."

Frenna did a big business all day long. The murder was the one subject
of conversation. Little parties were made up in his saloon--parties of
twos and threes--to go over and have a look at the outside of the junk
shop. Heise was the most important man the length and breadth of Polk
Street; almost invariably he accompanied these parties, telling again
and again of the part he had played in the affair.

"It was about eleven o'clock. I was standing in front of the shop, when
Mrs. McTeague--you know, the dentist's wife--came running across the
street," and so on and so on.

The next day came a fresh sensation. Polk Street read of it in the
morning papers. Towards midnight on the day of the murder Zerkow's body
had been found floating in the bay near Black Point. No one knew whether
he had drowned himself or fallen from one of the wharves. Clutched in
both his hands was a sack full of old and rusty pans, tin dishes--fully
a hundred of them--tin cans, and iron knives and forks, collected from
some dump heap.

"And all this," exclaimed Trina, "on account of a set of gold dishes
that never existed."

CHAPTER 17

One day, about a fortnight after the coroner's inquest had been held,
and when the excitement of the terrible affair was calming down and Polk
Street beginning to resume its monotonous routine, Old Grannis sat in
his clean, well-kept little room, in his cushioned armchair, his hands
lying idly upon his knees. It was evening; not quite time to light the
lamps. Old Grannis had drawn his chair close to the wall--so close, in
fact, that he could hear Miss Baker's grenadine brushing against the
other side of the thin partition, at his very elbow, while she rocked
gently back and forth, a cup of tea in her hands.

Old Grannis's occupation was gone. That morning the bookselling firm
where he had bought his pamphlets had taken his little binding apparatus
from him to use as a model. The transaction had been concluded. Old
Grannis had received his check. It was large enough, to be sure,
but when all was over, he returned to his room and sat there sad and
unoccupied, looking at the pattern in the carpet and counting the heads
of the tacks in the zinc guard that was fastened to the wall behind his
little stove. By and by he heard Miss Baker moving about. It was five
o'clock, the time when she was a