leading to the
bar was opened and shut by a young woman. She lingered doubtfully on the
threshold a moment, then walked with unsteady step across the room toward
the corner where the corpse sat. The light that struggled in from the
gloomy street fell upon her and showed that she trembled, as if with the
ague. Yet she was young, not over twenty-five; but on her heavy eyes and
sodden features there was the stamp death had just blotted from the
other's face with the memory of her sins. Yet, curiously blended with it,
not yet smothered wholly, there was something of the child, something that
had once known a mother's love and pity.

"Poor Kid," she said, stopping beside the body and sinking heavily in a
chair. "He will be sorry, anyhow."

"Who is Kid?" I asked.

"Why, Kid McDuff! You know him? His brother Jim keeps the saloon on
---- Street. Everybody knows Kid."

"Well, what was she to Kid?" I asked, pointing to the corpse.

"His girl," she said promptly. "An' he stuck to her till he was pulled for
the job he didn't do; then he had to let her slide. She stuck to him too,
you bet.

"Annie wasn't no more nor thirteen when she was tuk away from home by the
Kid," the girl went on, talking as much to herself as to me; the policeman
nodded in his chair. "He kep' her the best he could, 'ceptin' when he was
sent up on the Island the time the gang went back on him. Then she kinder
drifted. But she was all right agin he come back and tuk to keepin' bar
for his brother Jim. Then he was pulled for that Bridgeport skin job, and
when he went to the pen she went to the bad, and now----"

Here a thought that had been slowly working down through her besotted mind
got a grip on her strong enough to hold her attention, and she leaned over
and caught me by the sleeve, something almost akin to pity struggling in
her bleary eyes.

"Say, young feller," she whispered hoarsely, "don't spring this too hard.
She's got two lovely brothers. One of them keeps a daisy saloon up on
Eighth Avenue. They're respectable, they are."

Then she went on telling what she knew of Annie Noonan who was sitting
dead there before us. It was not much. She was the child of an honest
shoemaker who came to this country twenty-two or three years before from
his English home, when Annie was a little girl of six or seven. Before she
was in her teens she was left fatherless. At the age of thirteen, when she
was living in an East Side tenement with her mother, the K