conversation that they were not better than they need be. An old man and a young one, I gathered. An unpleasant house altogether, the low rent more easily explained than I at first guessed. Long afterwards I had my revenge upon those unsavoury Germans--by writing an awful story about them, "A Case of Eavesdropping," though by the time it was published they were probably either dead or in gaol. A sinister couple, these invisible Teutons!
My one main object was to avoid the Evening Sun: any work was better, I felt, than a return to that hated sensational reporting. A place was always open to me under McCloy, but my detestation of the police court, and of the criminal atmosphere generally, was so strong that I would rather have taken a street-cleaning job under Tammany than go back to it. I therefore began by trying free-lance work, gathering news items and selling them for a dollar or two apiece to various papers, writing snippets of description, inventing incidents, and earning perhaps ten dollars a week on the average. It was hard going, but pawning and free lunches in the saloons made it possible to live. I knew all the tricks by now; I used them. The blanket off my bed occasionally spent a week-*end with a new "Ikey," though getting it out of the house and back again was no easy matter, while the smell of the moth-balls I always expected must betray me. It was a poor blanket, too, worth only 50 cents from Ikey's point of view, and certainly not worth the foolish risk involved. For, literally--though this never once occurred to me at the time--it was stealing, and the fact that I told Ikey where it came from, hoping to extract thereby an extra half-dollar from him, could not have exonerated me if the landlady had met me on the stairs. Personally, I think the quantity of food I devoured at the free lunch counters in exchange for a five-cent glass of lager was a more flagrant case of theft. Only it was a recognized theft. The temporary absence of the blanket, anyhow, since I made my own bed, was never discovered, and my
heart remained innocent of conscious burglary.
