AN OCCURRENCE UP A SIDE

STREET
“See if he's still there, will you?” said
the man listlessly, as if knowing in
advance what the answer would be.
The woman, who, like the man, was in
her stocking feet, crossed the room,
closing the door with all softness behind
her. She felt her way silently through
the darkness of a small hallway, putting
first her ear and then her eye to a tiny
cranny in some thick curtains at a front
window.
She looked downward and outward
upon one of those New York side
streets that is precisely like forty other
New York side streets: two unbroken
lines of high-shouldered, narrow-
chested brick-and-stone houses, rising
in abrupt, straight cliffs; at the bottom
of the canyon a narrow river of roadway
with manholes and conduit covers
dotting its channel intermittently like
scattered stepping stones; and on[Pg
80] either side wide, flat pavements, as
though the stream had fallen to low-
water mark and left bare its shallow
banks. Daylight would have shown
most of the houses boarded up, with
diamond-shaped vents, like leering
eyes, cut in the painted planking of the
windows and doors; but now it was
night time—eleven o'clock of a wet,
hot, humid night of the late summer—
and the street was buttoned down its
length in the double-breasted fashion of
a bandmaster's coat with twin rows of
gas lamps evenly spaced. Under each
small circle of lighted space the
dripping, black asphalt had a slimy,
slick look like the sides of a newly
caught catfish. Elsewhere the whole
vista lay all in close shadow, black as a
cave mouth under every stoop front and
blacker still in the hooded basement
areas. Only, half a mile to the eastward
a dim, distant flicker showed where
Broadway ran, a broad, yellow streak
down the spine of the city, and high
above the broken skyline of eaves and
cornices there rolled in cloudy waves
the sullen red radiance, born of a
million electrics and the flares from gas
tanks and chimneys, which is only to be
seen on such nights as this, giving to the
heaven above New York that same
color tone you find in an artist's
conception of Babylon falling or Rome
burning.
From where the woman stood at the
window she could make out the round,
white, mushroom top of a policeman's
summer helmet as[Pg 81] its wearer
leaned back, half sheltered under the
narrow portico of the stoop just below
her; and she could see his uniform
sleeve and his hand, covered with a
white cotton glove, come up, carrying a
handkerchief, and mop the hidden face
under the helmet's brim. The squeak of
his heavy shoes was plainly audible to
her also. While she stayed there,
watching and listening, two
pedestrians—and only two—passed on
her side of the street: a messenger boy
in a glistening rubber poncho going
west and a man under an umbrella
going east. Each was hurrying along
until he came just opposite her, and
then, as though controlled by the same
set of strings, each stopped short and
looked up curiously at the blind, dark
house and at the figure lounging in the
doorway, then hurried on without a
word, leaving the silent policeman
fretfully mopping his moist face and
tugging at the wilted collar about his
neck.
After a minute or two at her peephole
behind the window curtains above, the
woman passed back through the door to
the inner, middle room where the man
sat.
“Still there,” she said lifelessly in the
half whisper that she had come to use
almost altogether these last few days;
“still there and sure to stay there until
another one just like him comes to take
his place. What else did you expect?”
The man only nodded absently and
went on[Pg 82] peeling an overripe
peach, striking out constantly, with the
hand that held the knife, at the flies.
They were green flies—huge, shiny-
backed, buzzing, persistent vermin.
There were a thousand of them; there
seemed to be a million of them. They
filled the shut-in room with their vile
humming; they swarmed everywhere in
the half light. They were thickest,
though, in a corner at the back, where
there was a closed, white door. Here a
great knot of them, like an iridescent,
shimmering jewel, was clustered about
the keyhole. They scrolled the white
enameled panels with intricate, shifting
patterns, and in pairs and singly they
promenaded busily on the white
porcelain knob, giving it the appearance
of being alive and having a motion of
its own.
It was stiflingly hot and sticky in the
room. The sweat rolled down the man's
face as he peeled his peach and pared
some half-rotted spots out of it. He
protected it with a cupped palm as he
bit into it. One huge green fly flipped
nimbly under the fending hand and lit
on the peach. With a savage little snarl
of disgust and loathing the man shook
the clinging insect off and with the
knife carved away the place where its
feet had touched the soft fruit. Then he
went on munching, meanwhile furtively
watching the woman. She was on the
opposite side of a small center-table
from him, with her face in her hands,
shaking her head with a little
shuddering motion whenever[Pg
83] one of the flies settled on her close-
cropped hair or brushed her bare neck.
He was a smallish man, with a
suggestion of something dapper about
him even in his present unkempt
disorder; he might have been handsome,
in a weakly effeminate way, had not
Nature or some mishap given his face a
twist that skewed it all to one side,
drawing all of his features out of focus,
like a reflection viewed in a flawed
mirror. He was no heavier than the
woman and hardly as tall. She,
however, looked less than her real
height, seeing that she was dressed, like
a half-grown boy, in a soft-collared shirt
open at the throat and a pair of loose
trousers. She had large but rather
regular features, pouting lips, a clear
brown skin and full, prominent brown
eyes; and one of them had a pronounced
cast in it—an imperfection already
made familiar by picture and printed
description to sundry millions of
newspaper readers. For this was Ella
Gilmorris, the woman in the case of the
Gilmorris murder, about which the
continent of North America was now
reading and talking. And the little man
with the twisted face, who sat across
from her, gnawing a peach stone clean,
was the notorious “Doctor” Harris
Devine, alias Vanderburg, her
accomplice, and worth more now to
society in his present untidy state than
ever before at any one moment of his
whole discreditable life, since for his
capture the people of the state of New
York stood[Pg 84] willing to pay the
sum of one thousand dollars, which tidy
reward one of the afternoon papers had
increased by another thousand.
Everywhere detectives—amateurs and
the kind who work for hire—were
seeking the pair who at this precise
moment faced each other across a little
center-table in the last place any
searcher would have suspected or
expected them to be—on the second
floor of the house in which the late
Cassius Gilmorris had been killed. This,
then, was the situation: inside, these two
fugitives, watchful, silent, their eyes
red-rimmed for lack of sleep, their
nerves raw and tingling as though
rasped with files, each busy with certain
private plans, each fighting off
constantly the touch of the nasty
scavenger flies that flickered and flitted
iridescently about them; outside, in the
steamy, hot drizzle, with his back to the
locked and double-locked door, a leg-
weary policeman, believing that he
guarded a house all empty except for
such evidences as yet remained of the
Gilmorris murder.

It was one of those small, chancy things

that so often disarrange the best laid
plots of murderers that had dished their
hope of a clean getaway and brought
them back, at the last, to the starting
point. If the plumber's helper, who was
sent to cure a bathtub of leaking in the
house next door, had not made a
mistake and come to the wrong number;
and if they,[Pg 85] in the haste of flight,
had not left an area door unfastened;
and if this young plumbing apprentice,
stumbling his way upstairs on the hunt
for the misbehaving drain, had not
opened the white enameled door and
found inside there what he did find—if
this small sequence of incidents had not
occurred as it did and when it did, or if
only it had been delayed another
twenty-four hours, or even twelve,
everything might have turned out
differently. But fate, to call it by its
fancy name—coincidence, to use its
garden one—interfered, as it usually
does in cases such as this. And so here
they were.
The man had been on his way to the
steamship office to get the tickets when
an eruption of newsboys boiled out of
Mail Street into Broadway, with extras
on their arms, all shouting out certain
words that sent him scurrying back in a
panic to the small, obscure family hotel
in the lower thirties where the woman
waited. From that moment it was she,
really, who took the initiative in all the
efforts to break through the doubled and
tripled lines that the police machinery
looped about the five boroughs of the
city.
At dark that evening “Mr. and Mrs. A.
Thompson, of Jersey City,” a quiet
couple who went closely muffled up,
considering that it was August, and
carrying heavy valises, took quarters at
a dingy furnished room house on a
miscalled avenue of Brooklyn not
far[Pg 86] from the Wall Street ferries
and overlooking the East River
waterfront from its bleary back
windows. Two hours later a very
different-looking pair issued quietly
from a side entrance of this place and
vanished swiftly down toward the
docks. The thing was well devised and
carried out well too; yet by morning the
detectives, already ranging and
quartering the town as bird-dogs quarter
a brier-field, had caught up again and
pieced together the broken ends of the
trail; and, thanks to them and the
newspapers, a good many thousand
wide awake persons were on the
lookout for a plump, brown-skinned
young woman with a cast in her right
eye, wearing a boy's disguise and
accompanied by a slender little man
carrying his head slightly to one side,
who when last seen wore smoked
glasses and had his face extensively
bandaged, as though suffering from a
toothache.
Then had followed days and nights of
blind twisting and dodging and hiding,
with the hunt growing warmer behind
them all the time. Through this they
were guided and at times aided by
things printed in the very papers that
worked the hardest to run them down.
Once they ventured as far as the outer
entrance of the great, new uptown
terminal, and turned away, too far gone
and sick with fear to dare run the
gauntlet of the waiting room and the
train-shed. Once—because they saw a
made-up Central Office man in every
lounging long-shoreman, and were not
so far wrong either—they[Pg 87] halted
at the street end of one of the smaller
piers and from there watched a grimy
little foreign boat that carried no
wireless masts and that might have
taken them to any one of half a dozen
obscure banana ports of South
America—watched her while she
hiccoughed out into midstream and
straightened down the river for the open
bay—watched her out of sight and then
fled again to their newest hiding place
in the lower East Side in a cold sweat,
with the feeling that every casual eye
glance from every chance passer-by
carried suspicion and recognition in its
flash, that every briskening footstep on
the pavement behind them meant
pursuit.
Once in that tormented journey there
was a sudden jingle of metal, like
rattling handcuffs, in the man's ear and
a heavy hand fell detainingly on his
shoulder—and he squeaked like a
caught shore-bird and shrunk away
from under the rough grips of a
truckman who had yanked him clear of
a lurching truck horse tangled in its own
traces. Then, finally, had come a
growing distrust for their latest
landlord, a stolid Russian Jew who read
no papers and knew no English, and
saw in his pale pair of guests only an
American lady and gentleman who kept
much to their room and paid well in
advance for everything; and after that,
in the hot rainy night, the flight afoot
across weary miles of soaking cross
streets and up through ill-lighted,
shabby avenues[Pg 88] to the one place
of refuge left open to them. They had
learned from the newspapers, at once a
guide and a bane, a friend and a
dogging enemy, that the place was
locked up, now that the police had got
through searching it, and that the
coroner's people held the keys. And the
woman knew of a faulty catch on a rear
cellar window, and so, in a fit of stark
desperation bordering on lunacy, back
they ran, like a pair of spent foxes
circling to a burrow from which they
have been smoked out.
Again it was the woman who picked for
her companion the easiest path through
the inky-black alley, and with her own
hands she pulled down noiselessly the
broken slats of the rotting wooden wall
at the back of the house. And then,
soon, they were inside, with the reeking
heat of the boxed-up house and the
knowledge that at any moment
discovery might come bursting in upon
them—inside with their busy thoughts
and the busy green flies. How persistent
the things were—shake them off a
hundred times and back they came
buzzing! And where had they all come
from? There had been none of them
about before, surely, and now their
maddening, everlasting droning filled
the ear. And what nasty creatures they
were, forever cleaning their shiny wings
and rubbing the ends of their forelegs
together with the loathsome suggestion
of little grave-diggers anointing their
palms. To the woman, at least, these
flies almost made bearable the[Pg
89] realization that, at best, this
stopping point could be only a
temporary one, and that within a few
hours a fresh start must somehow be
made, with fresh dangers to face at
every turning.

It was during this last hideous day of

flight and terror that the thing which
had been growing in the back part of the
brain of each of them began to assume
shape and a definite aspect. The man
had the craftier mind, but the woman
had a woman's intuition, and she
already had read his thoughts while yet
he had no clue to hers. For the primal
instinct of self-preservation, blazing up
high, had burned away the bond of
bogus love that held them together
while they were putting her drunkard of
a husband out of the way, and now there
only remained to tie them fast this
partnership of a common guilt.
In these last few hours they had both
come to know that together there was
no chance of ultimate escape; traveling
together the very disparity of their
compared appearances marked them
with a fatal and unmistakable
conspicuousness, as though they were
daubed with red paint from the same
paint brush; staying together meant
ruin—certain, sure. Now, then,
separated and going singly, there might
be a thin strand of hope. Yet the man
felt that, parted a single hour from the
woman, and she still alive, his wofully
small prospect[Pg 90] would diminish
and shrink to the vanishing point—New
York juries being most notoriously easy
upon women murderers who give
themselves up and turn state's evidence;
and, by the same mistaken processes of
judgment, notoriously hard upon their
male accomplices—half a dozen such
instances had been playing in flashes
across his memory already.
Neither had so much as hinted at
separating. The man didn't speak,
because of a certain idea that had
worked itself all out hours before within
his side-flattened skull. The woman
likewise had refrained from putting in
words the suggestion that had been
uppermost in her brain from the time
they broke into the locked house. Some
darting look of quick, malignant
suspicion from him, some inner
warning sense, held her mute at first;
and later, as the newborn hate and dread
of him grew and mastered her and she
began to canvass ways and means to a
certain end, she stayed mute still.
Whatever was to be done must be done
quietly, without a struggle—the least
sound might arouse the policeman at the
door below. One thing was in her
favor—she knew he was not armed; he
had the contempt and the fear of a tried
and proved poisoner for cruder lethal
tools.
It was characteristic also of the
difference between these two that
Devine should have had his plan stage-
set and put to motion long[Pg
91] before the woman dreamed of
acting. It was all within his orderly
scheme of the thing proposed that he, a
shrinking coward, should have set his
squirrel teeth hard and risked detection
twice in that night: once to buy a basket
of overripe fruit from a dripping Italian
at a sidewalk stand, taking care to get
some peaches—he just must have a
peach, he had explained to her; and
once again when he entered a dark little
store on Second Avenue, where liquors
were sold in their original packages, and
bought from a sleepy, stupid clerk two
bottles of a cheap domestic
champagne—“to give us the strength
for making a fresh start,” he told her
glibly, as an excuse for taking this
second risk. So, then, with the third
essential already resting at the bottom
of an inner waistcoat pocket, he was
prepared; and he had been waiting for
his opportunity from the moment when
they crept in through the basement
window and felt their way along, she
resolutely leading, to the windowless,
shrouded middle room here on the
second floor.

How she hated him, feared him too! He

could munch his peaches and uncork his
warm, cheap wine in this very room,
with that bathroom just yonder and
these flies all about. From under her
fingers, interlaced over her forehead,
her eyes roved past him, searching the
littered room for the twentieth time in
the hour, looking, seeking—and
suddenly they[Pg 92] fell on
something—a crushed and rumpled hat
of her own, a milliner's masterpiece,
laden with florid plumage, lying almost
behind him on a couch end where some
prying detective had dropped it, with a
big, round black button shining dully
from the midst of its damaged tulle
crown. She knew that button well. It
was the imitation-jet head of a hatpin—
a steel hatpin—that was ten inches long
and maybe longer.
She looked and looked at the round,
dull knob, like a mystic held by a
hypnotist's crystal ball, and she began to
breathe a little faster; she could feel her
resolution tighten within her like a
turning screw.
Beneath her brows, heavy and thick for
a woman's, her eyes flitted back to the
man. With the careful affectation of
doing nothing at all, a theatricalism that
she detected instantly, but for which she
could guess no reason, he was cutting
away at the damp, close-gnawed seed of
the peach, trying apparently to fashion
some little trinket—a toy basket,
possibly—from it. His fingers moved
deftly over its slick, wet surface. He had
already poured out some of the
champagne. One of the pint bottles
stood empty, with the distorted button-
headed cork lying beside it, and in two
glasses the yellow wine was fast going
flat and dead in that stifling heat. It still
spat up a few little bubbles to the
surface, as though minute creatures
were drowning in it down below.[Pg
93] The man was sweating more than
ever, so that, under the single, low-
turned gas jet, his crooked face had a
greasy shine to it. A church clock down
in the next block struck twelve slowly.
The sleepless flies buzzed evilly.
“Look out again, won't you?” he said
for perhaps the tenth time in two hours.
“There's a chance, you know, that he
might be gone—just a bare chance. And
be sure you close the door into the hall
behind you,” he added as if by an
afterthought. “You left it ajar once—
this light might show through the
window draperies.”
At his bidding she rose more willingly
than at any time before. To reach the
door she passed within a foot of the end
of the couch, and watching over her
shoulder at his hunched-up back she
paused there for the smallest fraction of
time. The damaged picture hat slid off
on the floor with a soft little thud, but
he never turned around.
The instant, though, that the hall door
closed behind her the man's hands
became briskly active. He fumbled in an
inner pocket of his unbuttoned
waistcoat; then his right hand, holding a
small cylindrical vial of a colorless
liquid, passed swiftly over one of the
two glasses of slaking champagne and
hovered there a second. A few tiny
globules fell dimpling into the top of the
yellow wine, then vanished; a heavy
reek, like the smell of crushed peach
kernels, spread through the[Pg
94] whole room. In the same motion
almost he recorked the little bottle,
stowed it out of sight, and with a quick,
wrenching thrust that bent the small
blade of his penknife in its socket he
split the peach seed in two lengthwise
and with his thumb-nail bruised the
small brown kernel lying snugly within.
He dropped the knife and the halved
seed and began sipping at the
undoctored glass of champagne, not
forgetting even then to wave his fingers
above it to keep the winged green
tormentors out.
The door at the front reopened and the
woman came in. Her thoughts were not
upon smells, but instinctively she
sniffed at the thick scent on the
poisoned air.
“I accidentally split this peach seed
open,” he said quickly, with an
elaborate explanatory air. “Stenches up
the whole place, don't it? Come, take
that other glass of champagne—it will
do you good to——”
Perhaps it was some subtle sixth sense
that warned him; perhaps the lightning-
quick realization that she had moved
right alongside him, poised and set to
strike. At any rate he started to fling up
his head—too late! The needle point of
the jet-headed hatpin entered exactly at
the outer corner of his right eye and
passed backward for nearly its full
length into his brain—smoothly,
painlessly, swiftly. He gave a little
surprised gasp, almost like a sob, and
lolled his head back against the chair
rest, like a man who has grown
suddenly tired. The[Pg 95] hand that
held the champagne glass relaxed
naturally and the glass turned over on
its side with a small tinkling sound and
spilled its thin contents on the table.
It had been easier than she had thought
it would be. She stepped back, still
holding the hatpin. She moved around
from behind him, and then she saw his
face, half upturned, almost directly
beneath the low light. There was no
blood, no sign even of the wound, but
his jaw had dropped down unpleasantly,
showing the ends of his lower front
teeth, and his eyes stared up
unwinkingly with a puzzled, almost a
disappointed, look in them. A green fly
lit at the outer corner of his right eye;
more green flies were coming. And he
didn't put up his hand to brush it away.
He let it stay—he let it stay there.
With her eyes still fixed on his face, the
woman reached out, feeling for her
glass of the champagne. She felt that
she needed it now, and at a gulp she
took a good half of it down her throat.
She put the glass down steadily enough
on the table; but into her eyes came the
same puzzled, baffled look that his
wore, and almost gently she slipped
down into the chair facing him.
Then her jaw lolled a little too, and
some of the other flies came buzzing
toward her.