FullReads

Miss Bailey had never responded with less alacrity to a cry for help. She had a genuine horror of the fierce, sore-eyed old vulture, with whom she had had to struggle so determinedly for the privilege of teaching Gertie. “Of course,” she said at last, “he will have to know–” But Miss Bailey was wrong, Mr. Armusheffsky never knew.

Room 18’s door opened again to admit two policemen, one plain-clothes man, who silently showed his badge to Miss Bailey, and three garrulous and dishevelled neighbors of the Armusheffsky menage.

At sight of Gertie the neighbors grew vociferous, triumphant. The policemen stationed themselves one on either side of Gertie, and the plain-clothes man explained to Miss Bailey that old Armusheffsky had been found murdered in his store, and that every man and woman for blocks around was as ready as these incoherent samples to testify that his granddaughter had often wished him dead, and had sometimes threatened to kill him.

“So I guess,” he ended pleasantly, “that ‘The Tombs’ will be this young lady’s address for a spell.”

“But I’ve been in Brooklyn all day,” protested Gertie when at last she found speech.

“Can you prove it? Talked to anybody? Got any witnesses?”

Gertie recapitulated her story.

“Got the goods you bought? Got the check on them?”

Gertie explained the loss of the purse.

The plain-clothes man shook his head. “I’m sorry, Miss,” said he to Miss Bailey, “but I guess it’s a case for the sergeant. Of course if that hand satchel turns up it will be all right, but the case looks bad to me. She ain’t the first what took the quickest way out of things she couldn’t stand. I don’t blame them myself, but that’s the jury’s business. Mine is to take the girl along with me. Your thinking so much of her will go a good ways to help her out. The patrol wagon is at the door. We’ll just be moseying along.”

Gertie went with him without a word. Her escape from her grandfather’s vituperations seemed to make her oblivious to everything else. Miss Bailey, however, was comforted by no such blindness. She realized that tragedy, perhaps death, had come to Room 18, and she set about averting them with characteristic energy.

The one frail thread upon which Gertie’s life hung led to one or two pawn shops whence purses, not hers, were reported. Then it snapped, and a whole mountain of circumstantial evidence was piled up in readiness to drop on her defenceless head when the days of the trial should come. Constance Bailey had never been so close to tragedy before, and she bore the juxtaposition very badly. She persisted in, and insisted upon effort, after the police and the reporters had done their best and worst. But always she was met, though never quite daunted, by the challenge to produce the purse with the proofs of alibi.

Under these conditions it naturally occurred that the little First Readers received but a very divided attention. Affairs of state in Room 18 were left largely to the board of monitors, and more than ever did it seem desirable to Isidore Cohen to secure a portfolio within that cabinet. For more than a week he had been ready to present his application. The proof of his fitness for office was wrapped in a newspaper under the decayed mattress upon which he slept. And he only waited a propitious moment to lay it and his application before Teacher. Her new habit of dashing away at the stroke of three had hitherto interfered with his plan, but about a week after Gertie’s arrest he found courage to elude the janitor, and to make his way to Room 18 at a quarter past eight in the morning.

And Miss Bailey arriving–pale, distraught, and heavy-eyed–at eight twenty-five, found the lost purse lying upon her blotter, and Isidore Cohen ready with the speech of presentation.

“Mine auntie,” it began–he had never had an aunt–“she don’t needs this pocket-book no more. You can have it.”