r seen him. And she figures he'll
be at the dock to meet her. But he's not there. But his cousin is
there--another Italian from the same town. He gets her through Ellis
Island somehow and he takes her up to where he's living--up in the
Bronx--and tells her the reason her husband ain't there to meet her. The
reason is, he's at Sing Sing, doing four years.

"It seems that after he's sent her this passage money the husband gets
to thinking Black Handing is a pretty soft way to make a living,
especially compared to day laboring, and he tries to raise a stake
single-handed. He writes a Black Hand letter to an Italian grocer he
knows has got money laid by, only the grocer is foxy and goes to the
Tremont Avenue Station and shows the letter. They rig up a plant and
this here Antonio Terranova walks into it. He's caught with the marked
bills on him. So just the week before she lands he takes a plea in
General Sessions and the judge gives him four years. When she gets to
where she's telling me that part of it she starts crying.

"Well, anyway, that's the situation--him up there at Sing Sing doing his
four years and her down here in New York with the kid on her hands. And
she don't ever see him again, either, because in about three or four
weeks--something like that--he's working with a gang in the rock quarry
across the river, where they're building the new cell house, and a chunk
of slate falls down and kills him and two others."

"Right here and now," interrupted the third deputy commissioner, "I want
to know what's all this here stuff got to do with these here charges and
specifications?"

"Just a minute, please. I'm coming to that right away, commissioner,"
protested the accused lieutenant with a sort of glib nervous agility;
yet for all of his promising, he paused for a little bit before he
continued. And this pause, brief enough as it was, gave the listening La
Farge time to discover, with a small inward jar of surprise, that
somehow, some way, he was beginning to lose some of his acrid antagonism
for Weil; that, by mental processes which as yet he could not exactly
resolve into their proper constituents, it was beginning to dribble
away from him. And realization came to him, almost with a shock, that
the man on the stand was telling the truth. Truth or not, though, the
narrative thus far had been commonplace enough--people at headquarters
hear the like of it often; and as a seasoned police reporter La Farge's
emotions