med to draw him toward that empty room on the second
story. He had decided once that he would not go, that there was not
time; but, after all, it would not take long, and there was at least the
possibility of gaining something more valuable even than time from the
scene of the crime itself--there might even be the evidence he wanted
there that would disclose the whole of Connie Myers' game.

He went down the steps, and started across the street; but halfway over,
he hesitated uncertainly, as a child's cry came petulantly from the
doorway. It was dark in the street; and, likewise, it was one of those
hot, suffocating evenings when, in the crowded tenements of the poorer
class, miserable enough in any case, misery was added to a hundredfold
for lack of a single God-given breath of air. These two facts,
apparently irrelevant, caused Jimmie Dale to change his mind again.
He had not noticed the woman with the baby in her arms, sitting on
the doorstep; but now, as he reached the curb, he not only saw, but
recognised her--and he swung on down the street toward the Bowery. He
could not very well go in without passing her, without being recognised
himself--and that was a needless risk.

He smiled a little wanly. Once the crime was discovered, she would not
have hesitated long before informing the police that she had seen him
enter there! Mrs. Hagan was no friend of his! One could not live as he
had lived, as Larry the Bat, and not see something in an intimate way
of the pitiful little tragedies of the poor around him; for, bad, tough,
and dissolute as the quarter was, all were not degraded there, some were
simply--poor. Mrs. Hagan was poor. Her husband was a day labourer, often
out of a job--and sometimes he drank. That was how he, Jimmie Dale,
or rather, Larry the Bat, had come to earn Mrs. Hagan's enmity. He had
found Mike Hagan drunk one night, and in the act of being arrested, and
had wheedled the man away from the officer on the promise that he would
take Hagan home. And he was Larry the Bat, a dope fiend, a character
known to all the neighbourhood, and Mrs. Hagan had laid her husband's
condition to HIS influence and companionship! He had taken Mike Hagan
home--and Mrs. Hagan had driven Larry the Bat from the door of her
miserable one-room lodging in that tenement with the bitter words on
her tongue that only a woman can use when shame and grief and anger are
breaking her heart.

He shrugged his shoulders, as, back along