eking.

Then came the crowd. The Bowery never sleeps. The policeman on the
beat set her in the doorway and sent a hurry call for an ambulance. It
came at last, and Nigger Martha was taken to the hospital.

As Mame told it, so it was recorded on the police blotter, with the
addition that she was anywhere from forty to fifty years old. That
was the strange part of it. It is not often that any one lasts out a
generation in the Bowery. Nigger Martha did. Her beginning was way
back in the palmy days of Billy McGlory and Owney Geoghegan. Her first
remembered appearance was on the occasion of the mock wake they got up
at Geoghegan's for Police Captain Foley when he was broken. That was
in the days when dive-keepers made and broke police captains, and made
no secret of it. Billy McGlory did not. Ever since, Martha was on the
street.

In time she picked up Maggie Mooney, and they got to be chummy. The
friendships of the Bowery by night may not be of a very exalted type,
but when death breaks them it leaves nothing to the survivor. That is
the reason suicides there happen in pairs. The story of Tilly Lorrison
and Tricksy came from the Tenderloin not long ago. This one of Maggie
Mooney and Nigger Martha was theirs over again.

In each case it was the younger, the one nearest the life that was
forever past, who took the step first, in despair. The other followed.
To her it was the last link with something that had long ceased to be
anything but a dream, which was broken. But without the dream life was
unbearable, in the Tenderloin and on the Bowery.

The newsboys were crying their night extras when Undertaker Reardon's
wagon jogged across the Bowery with Nigger Martha's body in it. She
had given the doctors the slip, as she had the policeman many a time.
A friend of hers, an Italian in The Bend, had hired the undertaker to
"do it proper," and Nigger Martha was to have a funeral.

All the Bowery came to the wake. The all-nighters from Chatham Square
to Bleecker Street trooped up to the top-floor flat in the Forsyth
Street tenement where Nigger Martha was laid out. There they sat
around, saying little and drinking much. It was not a cheery crowd.

The Bowery by night is not cheerful in the presence of The Mystery.
Its one effort is to get away from it, to forget--the thing it can
never do. When out of its sight it carouses boisterously, as children
sing and shout in the dark to persuade themselves that they are not
afraid. An