Daisy Herself. Will E. Ingersoll
angles, and, after bowling for a block or two down the city's main thoroughfare, turned down a side street and drew up at the door of a hoary frame hotel, its white-painted two-tier piazza weathered to a dingy gray.
Beatty and Daisy descended; and the old bus-driver, after first hitching the team to the weight, followed with the grips.
"You wait in the hall here, while I go an' dicker with the clerk, dear," said Beatty, ostentatiously, "I'll be right back."
Daisy, looking about her curiously, encountered suddenly the eye of Mr. Hogle, standing up the hall, out of sight of the hotel office. The eye had been trying for some moments to catch hers; and, now that it had succeeded, Mr. Hogle raised a huge forefinger, stained indelibly with harness-oil, and beckoned. Daisy went over briskly.
"Missis Beatty, hey?" said Mr. Hogle, toning his great voice to a low interrogative rumble.
Daisy nodded a careless affirmative. It was none of his business. She felt able to take care of this point herself, when the time should arrive.
"Like hell you are," said the unmincing Mr. Hogle, "ner wun't be. Break away from him as soon's as you can—that's if it ain't too late already. I know him."
Daisy dimpled; raising her chin challengingly, after a manner she had. But she did not answer.
"I guess you're all right yet," said Mr. Hogle, after a shrewd fatherly glance, "an' I see you're one of them confident kind. Them's the ones that gets ketched easiest. Now you'll mind what I told you—won't you, Missie?"
Daisy, regarding her adviser with dancing eyes, bobbed her chin up and down in mock docility; and Mr. Hogle, shaking his head pessimistically, went out to put away his team.
"What was that old geezer saying?" said Beatty, coming out of the office as the old man went outside.
"I—I'm sure I don't know," said Daisy, gravely, "I think he was trying to make love to me, Freddie."
"Wants to get his can beat off, eh?" remarked Beatty, carelessly; "well, what-oh-what does my little girlie want worst, right now?"
"Breakfast," replied Daisy, plumply; ducking roguishly to avoid the caress her questioner, imagining that was the thing she "wanted worst," sought to bestow.
"A-all right," said Beatty, swallowing his pique; "we'll go and see if they can scare us up some poached-two-on, right now. Then 'm going to take my baby out an' show her the best time she ever had, in all her young life—eh?"
"M'h'm," murmured Daisy, smiling to herself, as she followed her companion into the dining-room.
Breakfast that morning was a notable affair, a milestone in Daisy Nixon's days. Not because there was anything novel or striking about the garniture of the Imperial Hotel dining-room, which was a plain homely place, differing little from the eating-room of the Jubilee House in Toddburn—but because there hummed, and called, and clanged, and whistled through the open windows the multitudinous sounds of this new urban life into which she had, as it were, plunged headlong. Daisy listened absently to Beatty's chatter, conceding him an occasional dimple or smile; but otherwise almost forgot him until, as the meal ended, he laid his hand, hot and moist, over hers, and said:
"Well, how does my little-one feel about it now?"
Daisy glanced down at his white-pored hand, with its cigarette-yellowed finger-tips and outstanding blue veins. Then she looked up at him, and leaned one pretty cheek coaxingly close.
"You's baby feels ashamed in this old waist and skirt and hat," she said, softly; "ain't you going to get her some nice things to be married in?"
Beatty's hand squeezed hers.
"Your Freddie sure will do that for you," he said. "Let's go upstairs now, and figure out what we'll need."
Daisy suffered him to pull her out of her chair by the hand he held. Still retaining it, he led her out of the dining-room, along the hall, and up the stairway. At the top, she halted—fetching her companion, who had kept right on going, to a standstill with a jerk.
"Come on, come on," he said, making his tone matter-of-course, "the room is No. 19."
"What's the number of my room?" said Daisy, regarding him pleasantly but with a kind of odd under-gleam in her eyes.
"Y—your room!" Even Beatty, the inured, was embarrassed by that searching, direct look. "Why, I—I—darned if I remember the number."
Daisy continued to look at him a moment; then the shine in her eyes was succeeded by a twinkle, and this by a promising, coaxing side-glance.
"Well, then, let's go into the women's sitting-room, Freddie—this time."
Beatty knew when to yield a point—so he flattered himself.
"All right, Sweetest," he said, "you're the doctor—always."
They passed into the "ladies' parlor," which was empty, except for a few articles of faded furniture, among which a new red settee in one corner glowed with a preternatural brilliance. Beatty sat on the red settee and drew the girl down beside him.
"Somebody got a kiss for her Freddie?" he said, his lips loosely apart and wrinkles springing into view at the sides of his nostrils.
"Oh, I—do' know," Daisy dropped her head a little; "let's just talk. It's nice to sit together an' talk, when we love each other so, isn't it?"
Beatty's answer to this was to thrust his arm about her waist, push his palm beneath her chin, and pull up her face toward his. The girl resisted at first; then, with a motion of yielding, laid her head back on his shoulder and raised her lips. Beatty kissed her, not reverently but roughly; then kissed her again; then again and again: burying his mouth into hers. A little hand came up and caressed his neck; then slipped down within his coat and rested as it were, upon his heart—moving softly, as though feeling for its beats.
Then hand and girl and all tore suddenly and strongly away—and Daisy Nixon was upon her feet, her cheeks glowing like fire, laughing as she held up the leather purse she had taken from his pocket.
"It was the only way!" she cried, breathlessly and sparklingly, as he sat agape; "the only way to get out of you what you owe to me, for the things I have let you think about me, Mr. Fred Beatty. You thought I didn't know all about you—what you did to poor Pearlie Brodie, making her the talk of Toddburn, with worse to come yet—a poor motherless girl, who was given up by a decent fellow that would have married her, if it hadn't been for you. You thought I didn't know. Yes: you thought I 'fell for you', as you'd call it. But I'll tell you what I did, an' you can put it in your pipe an' smoke it, and I hope it'll do you good. I needed you. I needed to get away from that place where I was wasting my life, and I had no money—so I used you. I've met ginks like you before. I could see through you from the first like a pane of glass—you poor, miserable imitation of a man!
"Now, I'm going to take this money and use it, to keep me till I get a job somewhere. Then I'm going to pay it back. But not to you—don't you ever think it. I'm going to send it to Pearlie Brodie. She'll need it badly enough, in a few months from now. She'd never have got it from you straight—never in this world—so she'll get it through me. Now, you get out of here! I've wasted too much breath talking to you. And keep this in your memory-box: I don't know you! So don't speak to me, if I ever have the bad luck to meet you again!"
The girl had barely finished speaking, when Beatty leaped at her, grabbing for the purse which she held. But she stepped quickly back—and, as he pressed in, gave him, with all the strength of her virile young body, a push that sent him sprawling.
"You give me that money," Beatty said, his face pasty and mean with fury, as he climbed to his feet and stood, slowly dusting off his clothes; "that's all I want out o' you. Hand it over, or I'll go down and phone for a constable, and have you taken to the police station.
"Yes—you will!" Daisy challenged. "I suppose you think no person around Toddburn ever reads the city papers and notices