I run up, an' she was settin' up, in the black waist--but I thought her
eyes was shiney with somethin' that wasn't the fever--sort of a scared
excitement.

"'Mr. Bemus,' she says, 'I want you to do somethin' for me,' she says,
'an' not tell anybody. Will you?'

"'Why, yes,' I says, 'I will, Mis' Loneway,' I says. 'What is it?' I
ask' her.

"'There's a baby somewheres downstairs,' she says. 'I hear it cryin'
sometimes. An' I want you to get it an' bring it up here.'

"That was a queer thing to ask, because kids isn't soothin' to the sick.
But I went off downstairs to the first floor front. The kid she meant
belonged to the Tomato Ketchup woman. I knew they had one because it
howled different times an', I judge, pounded its head on the floor some
when it was maddest. It was the only real little one in the
buildin'--the others was all the tonguey age. I told what I wanted.

"'For the land!' says Tomato Ketchup, 'I never see such nerve. Take my
baby into a sick room? Not if I know it. I s'pose you just come out o'
there? Well, don't you stay here, bringin' diseases. A hospital's the
true place fer the sick,' she says.

"I went back to Mis' Loneway, an' I guess I lied some. I said the kid
was sick--had the croup, I thought, an' she'd hev to wait. Her face
fell, but she said 'all right an' please not to say nothin',' an' then I
went out an' done my best to borrow a kid for her. I ask' all over the
neighbourhood, an' not a woman but looked on me for a cradle
snatcher--thought I wanted to abduct her child away from her. Bime-by I
even told one woman what I wanted it for.

"'My!' she says, 'if she ain't got one, she's got one less mouth to
feed. Tell her to thank her stars.'

"After that I used to look into Mis' Loneway's frequent. The women on
the same floor was quite decent to her, but they worked all day, an'
mostly didn't get home till after her husband did. I found out somethin'
about him, too. He was clerk in a big commission house 'way down-town,
an' his salary, as near as I could make out, was about what mine was,
an' they wa'n't no estimatin' that by the cord at all. But I never heard
a word out'n him about their not havin' much. He kep' on makin' milk
toast an' bringin' in one piece o' fruit at a time an' once in a while a
little meat. An' all the time anybody could see she wa'n't gettin' no
better. I knew she wa'n't gettin' enough to eat, an' I knew he knew it,
too. An' one night the doctor he outs with the