The sunlight washed away some of the fear. He couldn't be too frightened
with all these people around. Why, not fifteen feet away a big burly traffic
cop was busily unsnarling a traffic jam.
His mercurial mood shifted again when one of his backward glances showed
standing out from the crowd of anonymous faces the gaunt harsh face of... This
was too much. How had the other man followed him? It was uncanny. Go into no
matter what crowd he would, let him dash into a swirling pool of mankind, still
that face arose to haunt him.
Forty-eight hours. He shook his head. Maybe he was getting a bit punchy.
Maybe some sleep would make a bit of difference. If he could sleep... he
yawned. Just a nap would help. This way it seemed like black magic. Perhaps if
he were rested, things would look differently.
But where could he go? Where to escape, if only for an hour? He walked on
through the streets of the strange city. He'd never been here before. All his
life had been spent on different levels. He was accustomed to being taken care
of. Ordinarily, one of the servants bought his train tickets, the chauffeur
drove him to the station, guided him to the proper track, and practically put
him on the train.
Going it blind this way, he could see how much his father's money had
coddled him. Maybe if his heart hadn't had that murmur, if he'd been in the
army, he might have become more self-reliant. But if he'd been in the army, he
probably wouldn't have been in this scrape.
He shrugged. He had come to a part of the city where wealth and poverty
were sisters in arms. Most big cities have these strange areas where the poor
are being usurped by the rich, where the process has not come to an end.
In New York, he thought, there was Sutton Place, where a distance of
twenty feet could take you from an elevator apartment to a tenement, and the
rent for the apartment for a month could pay the tenement rent for more than a
year.
This was such an area. He could not go toward the expensive looking
section. There was no surcease for him there. Perhaps... he turned to the left.
If he had gone to the right? That would have been another story. Looking back on
it, an hour later, he could not help but wonder what his fate would have held
for him had he gone to the right.
TO the left, past garages, past tumble-down wooden fronted houses, past
garbage cans whose covers lay to one side, pushed there by gaunt alley cats,
allowing the contents of the cans to fester in the hot sun.
He walked slowly now. He had lost his second wind, or whatever it was that
had sustained him this long. Ahead was a group of men. Ordinarily, in that other
life he had left behind, he would have avoided such a group. You can see them
anywhere. Their social club is the street corner, their reason to be
questionable, their means of livelihood invisible. They were, in short, street
hoodlums.
There were four of them. Here was another chance for the fates. If he had
crossed the street and avoided them, then Charley Bates would not have been
arrested, and...
But he did not cross the street.
As he walked up to them, one of them who wore glasses said, "Pipe the
