given it all to him if he had just come right out and asked for it.'
Ratigan stared at her in speechless amazement 'You mean you would have given that charlatan all of that huge sum of money that you won if he had asked for it? Good God, woman, why?'
'Because I believed in him,' she said, crying almost hysterically now. 'That's why. If you is a black woman like me, you got to believe in something.'
Sergeant Ratigan had intended to ask her, during the course of the interrogation, why she had gone with Slick and Susie up to her empty flat where they had tortured her and struck her in the head, but now he didn't have the heart.
'The chances are the court is going to let you off if the Prophet pulls through, and it looks as though he will,' Ratigan said. 'Now don't you go and stab your man Sugar, next, because you might kill him, and that will be serious.'
She looked up puzzled. 'What's he done?'
Ratigan was flustered. 'Oh, I thought you knew that he was trying to steal your money, too.'
A tiny smile peeped through her tears. 'Oh, I ain't mad at him for that,' she said. 'He was just doing what comes natural.'
Ratigan called it a finish. A matron came and locked her up until the wagon came to take her downtown again for arraignment next morning.
No sooner had the key turned in the lock than she was singing:
'I'm blue
But I wont be blue always
'Cause the sun's going to shine in my back door
Some day.'
Some days later, when Sweet Prophet was asked by members of the colored press why he had taken her money, he replied,
'I needed it. It takes a lot of money to be a prophet these days. It's the high cost of living.'
