At times men at other tables regarded the girl furtively.
Pete, aware of it, nodded at her and grinned.
He felt proud.
“Mag, yer a bloomin’ good-looker,”
he remarked, studying her face through the haze.
The men made Maggie fear, but she blushed at Pete’s
words as it became apparent to her that she was the
apple of his eye.
Grey-headed men, wonderfully pathetic in their dissipation,
stared at her through clouds. Smooth-cheeked
boys, some of them with faces of stone and mouths
of sin, not nearly so pathetic as the grey heads,
tried to find the girl’s eyes in the smoke wreaths.
Maggie considered she was not what they thought her.
She confined her glances to Pete and the stage.
The orchestra played negro melodies and a versatile
drummer pounded, whacked, clattered and scratched
on a dozen machines to make noise.
Those glances of the men, shot at Maggie from under
half-closed lids, made her tremble. She thought
them all to be worse men than Pete.
“Come, let’s go,” she said.
As they went out Maggie perceived two women seated
at a table with some men. They were painted
and their cheeks had lost their roundness. As
she passed them the girl, with a shrinking movement,
drew back her skirts.
Jimmie did not return home for a number of days after
the fight with Pete in the saloon. When he did,
he approached with extreme caution.
He found his mother raving. Maggie had not returned
home. The parent continually wondered how her
daughter could come to such a pass. She had
never considered Maggie as a pearl dropped unstained
into Rum Alley from Heaven, but she could not conceive
how it was possible for her daughter to fall so low
as to bring disgrace upon her family. She was
terrific in denunciation of the girl’s wickedness.
The fact that the neighbors talked of it, maddened
her. When women came in, and in the course of
their conversation casually asked, “Where’s
Maggie dese days?” the mother shook her fuzzy
head at them and appalled them with curses.
Cunning hints inviting confidence she rebuffed with
violence.
“An’ wid all deh bringin’ up she
had, how could she?” moaningly she asked of
her son. “Wid all deh talkin’ wid
her I did an’ deh t’ings I tol’
her to remember? When a girl is bringed up deh
way I bringed up Maggie, how kin she go teh deh devil?”
Jimmie was transfixed by these questions. He
could not conceive how under the circumstances his
mother’s daughter and his sister could have
been so wicked.
His mother took a drink from a squdgy bottle that
sat on the table. She continued her lament.
“She had a bad heart, dat girl did, Jimmie.
She was wicked teh deh heart an’ we never knowed
it.”
Jimmie nodded, admitting the fact.
“We lived in deh same house wid her an’
I brought her up an’ we never knowed how bad
she was.”
