'A cool hundred,' said Fuzzy thoughtfully and mushily.
'Booys,' said he, 'you are true friends. I'll go up and claim the reward. The show business is not what it used to be.'
Night was falling more surely. The three tagged at his sides to the foot of the rise on which stood the Millionaire's house. There Fuzzy turned upon them acrimoniously.
'You are a pack of putty-faced beagle-hounds,' he roared. 'Go away.'
They went away--a little way.
In 'Pigeon' McCarthy's pocket was a section of one-inch gas-pipe eight inches long. In one end of it and in the middle of it was a lead plug. One-half of it was packed tight with solder. Black Riley carried a slung-shot, being a conventional thug. 'One-ear' Mike relied upon a pair of brass knucks--an heirloom in the family.
'Why fetch and carry,' said Black Riley, 'when some one will do it for ye? Let him bring it out to us. Hey-- what?'
'We can chuck him in the river,' said 'Pigeon' McCarthy, 'with a stone tied to his feet.'
'Youse guys make me tired,' said 'One-ear' Mike sadly. 'Ain't progress ever appealed to none of yez? Sprinkle a little gasoline on 'im, and drop 'im on the Drive--well?'
Fuzzy entered the Millionaire's gate and zigzagged toward the softly glowing entrance of the mansion. The three goblins came up to the gate and lingered--one on each side of it, one beyond the roadway. They fingered their cold metal and leather, confident.
Fuzzy rang the door-bell, smiling foolishly and dreamily. An atavistic instrinct prompted him to reach for the button of his right glove. But he wore no gloves; so his left hand dropped, embarrassed.
The particular menial whose duty it was to open doors to silks and laces shied at first sight of Fuzzy. But a second glance took in his passport, his card of admission, his surety of welcome--the lost rag-doll of the daughter of the house dangling under his arm.
Fuzzy was admitted into a great hall, dim with the glow from unseen lights. The hireling went away and returned with a maid and the Child. The doll was restored to the mourning one. She clasped her lost darling to her breast; and then, with the inordinate selfishness and candor of childhood, stamped her foot and whined hatred and fear of the odious being who had rescued her from the depths of sorrow and despair. Fuzzy wriggled himself into an ingratiatory attitude and essayed the idiotic smile and blattering small talk that is supposed to charm the budding intellect of the young. The Child bawled, and was dragged away, hugging her Betsy close.
There came the Secretary, pale, poised, polished, gliding in pumps, and worshipping pomp and ceremony. He counted out into Fuzzy's hand ten ten-dollar bills; then dropped his eye upon the door, transferred it to James, its custodian, indicated the obnoxious earner of the reward with the other, and allowed his pumps to waft him away to secretarial regions.
James gathered Fuzzy with his own commanding optic and swept him as far as the front door.
When the money touched fuzzy's dingy palm his first instinct was to take to his heels; but a second thought restrained him from that blunder of etiquette. It was his; it had been given him. It--and, oh, what an elysium it opened to the gaze of his mind's eye! He had tumbled to the foot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless, friendless, ragged, cold, drifting; and he held in his hand the key to a paradise of the mud-honey that he craved. The fairy doll had waved a wand with her rag-stuffed hand; and now wherever he might go the enchanted palaces with shining foot-rests and magic red fluids in gleaming glassware would be open to him.
He followed James to the door.
He paused there as the flunky drew open the great mahogany portal for him to pass into the vestibule.
Beyond the wrought-iron gates in the dark highway Black Riley and his two pals casually strolled, fingering under their coats the inevitably fatal weapons that were to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs.
Fuzzy stopped at the Millionaire's door and bethought himself. Like little sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree, certain living green thoughts and memories began to decorate his confused mind. He was quite drunk, mind you, and the present was beginning to fade. Those wreaths aand festoons of holly with their scarlet berries making the great hall gay--where had he seen such things before? Somewhere he had known polished floors and odors of fresh flowers in winter, and--and some one was singing a song in the house that he thought he had heard before. Some one singing and playing a harp. Of course, it was Christmas--Fuzzy though he must have been pretty drunk to have overlooked that.
And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him out of some impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little, pure-white, transient, forgotten ghost--the spirit of
James opened the outer door. A stream of light went down the graveled walk to the iron gate. Black Riley, McCarthy, and 'One-ear' Mike saw, and carelessly drew their sinister cordon closer about the gate.
With a more imperious gesture than James's master had ever used or could ever use, Fuzzy compelled the menial to close the door. Upon a gentleman certain things devolve. Especially at the Christmas season.
'It is cust--customary,' he said to James, the flustered, 'when a gentleman calls on Christmas Eve to pass the compliments of the season with the lady of the house. You und'stand? I shall not move shtep till I pass compl'ments season with lady the house. Und'stand?'
There was an argument. James lost. Fuzzy raised his voice and sent it through the house unpleasantly. I did not say he was a gentleman. He was simply a tramp being visited by a ghost.
A sterling silver bell rang. James went back to answer it, leaving Fuzzy in the hall. James explained somewhere to some one.
Then he came and conducted Fuzzy into the library.
The lady entered a moment later. She was more beautiful and holy than any picture that Fuzzy had seen. She smiled, and said something about a doll. Fuzzy didn't understand that; he remembered nothing about a doll.
A footman brought in two small glasses of sparkling wine on a stamped sterling-silver waiter. The Lady took
