could
judge, all sorts of purchases, as though out of the midst of abject
poverty a golden shower had suddenly descended upon her. And she was
gray, and well beyond middle age, and crying bitterly; and her free
hand, whether to support herself or with the instinctive idea of
supporting her companion, was clutched tightly around the man's
shoulders. And the man rocked unsteadily upon his feet. He was tall
and angular, and older than the woman, and cadaverous of feature, and
miserably thin of shoulder, and blood trickled over his forehead and
down one ashen, hollow cheek--and above the excited exclamations of the
crowd Rhoda Gray heard him cough.

Rhoda Gray glanced around her. Where scarcely a second before she had
been on the outer fringe of the crowd, she now appeared to be in the
very center of it. Women were pushing up behind her, women who wore
shawls as she did, only the shawls were mostly of gaudy colors; and
men pushed up behind her, mostly men of swarthy countenance, who wore
circlets of gold in their ears; and, brushing her skirts, seeking
vantage points, ragged, ill-clad children wriggled and wormed their way
deeper into the press. It was a crowd composed almost entirely of the
foreign element which inhabited that quarter--and the crowd chattered
and gesticulated with ever-increasing violence. She did not understand.
And she could not see so well now. That pitiful tableau in the doorway
was being shut out from her by a man, directly in front of her, who had
hoisted a half-naked tot of three or four to a reserved seat upon his
head.

And then a young man, one whom, from her years in the Bad Lands as the
White Moll, she recognized as a hanger-on at a gambling hell in the
Chatham Square district, came toward her, plowing his way, contemptuous
of obstructions, out of the crowd.

Rhoda Gray, as Gypsy Nan, hailed him out of the corner of her mouth.

"Say, wot's de row?" she demanded.

The young man grinned.

"Somebody pinched a million from de old guy!" He shifted his cigarette
with a deft movement of his tongue from one side of his mouth to the
other, and grinned again. "Can youse beat it! Accordin' to him, he had
enough coin to annex de whole of Noo Yoik! De moll's his wife. He went
out to hell-an'-gone somewhere for a few years huntin' gold while de
old girl starved. Den back he comes an' blows in to-day wid his pockets
full, an' de old girl grabs a handful, an' goes out to buy up all de
grub in sight 'c