to pick up a little extra money—to help pay the rent I suppose—by sub-letting the two little back rooms of that place of theirs.
Various people lived in the dark tiny holes, just how I can't make out, as there was no furniture. Still there are places in Chicago called "flops" where one may sleep on the floor for five or ten cents, and they are more patronized than respectable people know anything about.
What I did discover was a little woman—she wasn't so young, but she was hunchbacked and small and it is hard not to think of her as a girl—who once lived in one of the rooms for several weeks. She had a job as an ironer in a small hand laundry in the neighbourhood, and someone had given her a cheap folding cot. She was a curiously sentimental creature with the kind of hurt eyes deformed people often have, and I have a fancy she had herself a romantic attachment of a sort for the man Wilson. Anyway I managed to find out a lot from her.
After the other woman's death and after Wilson had been cleared on the murder charge by the confession of the stage-hand, I used to go over to the house where he had lived sometimes in the late afternoon after our paper had been put to bed for the day. Ours is an afternoon paper and after two o'clock most of us are free.
I found the hunchback girl standing in front of the house one day and began talking with her. She was a gold mine.
There was that look in her eyes I've told you of, the hurt sensitive look. I just spoke to her and we began talking of Wilson. She had lived in one of the rooms at the back. She told me of that at once.
On some days she had found herself unable to work at the laundry because her strength suddenly gave out, and so on such days she stayed in the room lying on the cot. Blinding headaches came that lasted for hours, during which she was almost entirely unconscious of everything going on about her. Then afterwards she was quite conscious, but for a long time very weak. She wasn't one who is destined to live very long I suppose, and I presume she didn't much care.
Anyway, there she was in the room in that weak state after the times of illness; and she grew curious about the two people in the front room, so she used to get off her couch and go softly in her
