d have certainly come to Casey's ears.

He could do nothing but wait. And yet thirty days was a significant
number to his friends, and an absence of that duration would be hard
to explain. On Wednesday morning, two days after his arrest, he was
put to work with a gang of twenty men breaking stone on the roadway
that leads from the insane quarters to the penitentiary. It was a
warm, sunny day, and the city, lying just across the narrow channel,
never looked more beautiful. It seemed near enough for him to reach
out his hand and touch it. And the private yachts and big
excursion-boats that passed, banging out popular airs and alive with
bunting, made Hefty feel very bitter. He determined that when he got
back he would go look up the policeman who had assaulted him and break
his head with a brick in a stocking. This plan cheered him somewhat,
until he thought again of Mary Casey at the dance that night with
Patsy Moffat, and this excited him so that he determined madly to
break away and escape. His first impulse was to drop his crowbar and
jump into the river on the instant, but his cooler judgment decided
him to wait.

At the northern end of the Island the grass runs high, and there are
no houses of any sort upon it. It reaches out into a rocky point,
where it touches the still terribly swift eddies of Hell Gate, and its
sharp front divides the water and directs it towards Astoria on the
east and the city on the west. Hefty determined to walk off from the
gang of workmen until he could drop into this grass and to lie there
until night. This would be easy, as there was only one man to watch
them, for they were all there for only ten days or one month, and the
idea that they should try to escape was hardly considered. So Hefty
edged off farther from the gang, and then, while the guard was busy
lighting his pipe, dropped into the long grass and lay there quietly,
after first ridding himself of his shoes and jacket. At six o'clock a
bell tolled and the guard marched away, with his gang shambling after
him. Hefty guessed they would not miss him until they came to count
heads at supper-time; but even now it was already dark, and lights
were showing on the opposite bank. He had selected the place he meant
to swim for--a green bank below a row of new tenements, a place where
a few bushes still stood, and where the boys of Harlem hid their
clothes when they went in swimming.

* * * * *

At half-