him. Carmen stood there with face of
stone. She stamped her foot. "Shoot!" she commanded, pointing,
relentless, at the struggling man. "Coward, shoot!"

Her lover's finger crooked itself upon the trigger. A shriek, wild and
despairing, rang through the alley. A woman ran madly from the house,
flew across the pavement, and fell panting at Carmen's feet.

"Mother of God! mercy!" she cried, thrusting her babe before the
assassin's weapon. "Jesus Maria! Carmen, the child! He is my
husband!"

No gleam of pity came into the cold eyes. Only hatred, fierce and
bitter, was there. In one swift, sweeping glance she saw it all: the
woman fawning at her feet, the man she hated limp and helpless in the
grasp of her lover.

"He was mine once," she said, "and he had no mercy." She pushed the
baby aside. "Coward, shoot!"

The shot was drowned in the shriek, hopeless, despairing, of the widow
who fell upon the body of Francisco as it slipped lifeless from the
grasp of the assassin. The christening party saw Carmen standing over
the three with the same pale smile on her cruel lips.

For once The Bend did not shield a murderer. The door of the tenement
was shut against him. The women spurned him. The very children spat
upon him as he fled to the street. The police took him there. With him
they seized Carmen. She made no attempt to escape. She had bided her
time, and it had come. She had her revenge. To the end of its lurid
life Bottle Alley remembered it as the murder accursed of God.

IN THE MULBERRY STREET COURT

"Conduct unbecoming an officer," read the charge, "in this, to wit,
that the said defendants brought into the station-house, by means to
deponent unknown, on the said Fourth of July, a keg of beer, and, when
apprehended, were consuming the contents of the same." Twenty
policemen, comprising the whole off platoon of the East One Hundred
and Fourth Street squad, answered the charge as defendants. They had
been caught grouped about a pot of chowder and the fatal keg in the
top-floor dormitory, singing, "Beer, beer, glorious beer!" Sergeant
McNally and Roundsman Stevenson interrupted the proceedings.

The Commissioner's eyes bulged as, at the call of the complaint clerk,
the twenty marched up and ranged themselves in rows, three deep,
before him.

They took the oath collectively, with a toss and a smack, as if to
say, "I don't care if I do," and told separately and identically the
same story, while the Sergeant