When I arrived at the Crescent City I hurried away—­far away from the St. Charles to a dim chambre garnie in Bienville Street.  And there, looking down from my attic window from time to time at the old, yellow, absinthe house across the street, I wrote this story to buy my bread and butter.

“Can thim that helps others help thimselves?”

[Illustration:  “Can the horse run?” (cartoon from The Rolling Stone)]

THE MARIONETTES

      [Originally published in The Black Cat for April, 1902,
      The Short Story Publishing Co.]

The policeman was standing at the corner of Twenty-fourth Street and a prodigiously dark alley near where the elevated railroad crosses the street.  The time was two o’clock in the morning; the outlook a stretch of cold, drizzling, unsociable blackness until the dawn.

A man, wearing a long overcoat, with his hat tilted down in front, and carrying something in one hand, walked softly but rapidly out of the black alley.  The policeman accosted him civilly, but with the assured air that is linked with conscious authority.  The hour, the alley’s musty reputation, the pedestrian’s haste, the burden he carried—­these easily combined into the “suspicious circumstances” that required illumination at the officer’s hands.

The “suspect” halted readily and tilted back his hat, exposing, in the flicker of the electric lights, an emotionless, smooth countenance with a rather long nose and steady dark eyes.  Thrusting his gloved hand into a side pocket of his overcoat, he drew out a card and handed it to the policeman.  Holding it to catch the uncertain light, the officer read the name “Charles Spencer James, M. D.”  The street and number of the address were of a neighborhood so solid and respectable as to subdue even curiosity.  The policeman’s downward glance at the article carried in the doctor’s hand—­a handsome medicine case of black leather, with small silver mountings—­further endorsed the guarantee of the card.

“All right, doctor,” said the officer, stepping aside, with an air of bulky affability.  “Orders are to be extra careful.  Good many burglars and hold-ups lately.  Bad night to be out.  Not so cold, but—­clammy.”

With a formal inclination of his head, and a word or two corroborative of the officer’s estimate of the weather, Doctor James continued his somewhat rapid progress.  Three times that night had a patrolman accepted his professional card and the sight of his paragon of a medicine case as vouchers for his honesty of person and purpose.  Had any one of those officers seen fit, on the morrow, to test the evidence of that card he would have found it borne out by the doctor’s name on a handsome doorplate, his presence, calm and well dressed, in his well-equipped office—­provided it were not too early, Doctor James being a late riser—­and the testimony of the neighborhood to his good citizenship, his devotion to his family, and his success as a practitioner the two years he had lived among them.