Calvary Alley Part 18

On the red-letter Sunday when Uncle Jed had tramped the ten miles out from town to a.s.sure himself of Nance's well-being, he discovered in Doc an old comrade of the Civil War. They had been in the same company, Uncle Jed as a drummer boy, and Doc in charge of the cavalry horses.

"Why, I expect you recollict this child's grandpaw," Uncle Jed said, with his hand on Nance's head, "Molloy, 'Fightin' Phil,' they called him. Went down with the colors at Chickasaw Bluffs."

Doc did remember. Fighting Phil had been one of the idols of his boyhood.

Miss Stanley found in this friends.h.i.+p a solution of Nance's chief difficulty. When a person of eleven has been doing practical housekeeping for a family of eight, she naturally resents the suggestion that there is anything in domestic science for her to learn. Moreover, when said person is anemic and nervous from overwork, and has a tongue that has never known control, it is perilously easy to get into trouble, despite heroic efforts to be good.

The wise superintendent saw in the girl all sorts of possibilities for both good and evil. For unselfish service and pa.s.sionate sacrifice, as well as obstinate rebellion and hot-headed folly.

At those unhappy times when Nance threatened to break over the bounds, she was sent out to the stables to spend an afternoon with Doc. No matter how sore her grievance, it vanished in the presence of the genial old veterinarian. She never tired of hearing him tell of her fighting Irish grandfather and the pranks he played on his messmates, of Uncle Jed and the time he lost his drumsticks and marched barefoot in the snow, beating his drum with the heels of his shoes.

Most of all she liked the horses. She learned how to put on bandages and poultices and to make a bran mash. Doc taught her how to give a sick horse a drink out of a bottle without choking him, how to hold his tongue with one hand and put a pill far down his throat with the other. The nursing of sick animals seemed to come to her naturally, and she found it much more interesting than school work and domestic science.

"She's got a way with critters," Doc confided proudly to Miss Stanley.

"I've seen a horse eat out of her hand when it wouldn't touch food in the manger."

As the months slipped into years, the memory of Calvary Alley grew dim, and Nance began to look upon herself as an integral part of this orderly life which stretched away in a pleasant perspective of work and play. It was the first time that she had ever been tempted to be good, and she fell. It was not Miss Stanley's way to say "don't." Instead, she said, "do," and the "do's" became so engrossing that the "don'ts"

were crowded out.

At regular, intervals Mrs. Snawdor made application for her dismissal, and just as regularly a probation officer visited the Snawdor flat and p.r.o.nounced it unfit.

"I suppose if I had a phoneygraf an' lace curtains you'd let her come home," Mrs. Snawdor observed caustically during one of these inspections.

"You bet I'll fix things up next time if I know you are comin'!"

The State was doing its clumsy best to make up to Nance for what she had missed. It was giving her free board, free tuition, and protection from harmful influences. But that did not begin to square the State's account, nor the account of society. They still owed her something for that early environment of dirt and disease. The landlord in whose vile tenement she had lived, the saloon-keeper who had sold her beer, the manufacturer who had bought the garments she made at starvation wages, were all her debtors. Society exists for the purpose of doing justice to its members, and society had not begun to pay its debt to that youthful member whose lot had been cast in Calvary Alley.

One Sat.u.r.day afternoon in the early spring of Nance's fourth year at Forest Home, Miss Stanley stood in the school-house door, reading a letter. It was the kind of a day when heaven and earth cannot keep away from each other, but the fleecy clouds must come down to play in the sparkling pools, and white and pink blossoms must go climbing up to the sky to flaunt their sweetness against the blue. Yet Miss Stanley, reading her letter, sighed.

Coming toward her down the hillside, plunged a noisy group of children, and behind them in hot pursuit came Nance Molloy, angular, long-legged, lithe as a young sapling and half mad with the spring.

"Such a child still!" sighed Miss Stanley, as she lifted a beckoning hand.

The children crowded about her, all holding out hot fists full of faded wild flowers.

"Look!" cried one breathlessly. "We found 'em in the hollow. And Nance says if you'll let her, she'll take us next Sat.u.r.day to the old mill where some yellow vi'lets grow!"

Miss Stanley looked down at the flushed, happy faces; then she put her arm around Nance's shoulder.

"Nancy will not be with us next Sat.u.r.day," she said regretfully. "She's going home."

CHAPTER XII

CLARKE'S

Nance Molloy came out of Forest Home, an independent, efficient girl, with clear skin, luminous blue eyes, and s.h.i.+ning braids of fair hair. She came full of ideals and new standards and all the terrible wisdom of sixteen, and she dumped them in a ma.s.s on the family in Calvary Alley and boldly announced that "what she was going to do was a-plenty!"

But like most reformers, she reckoned too confidently on cooperation. The rest of the Snawdor family had not been to reform school, and it had strong objections to Nance's drastic measures. Her innovations met with bitter opposition from William J., who indignantly declined to have the hitherto respected privacy of his ears and nose invaded, to Mrs. Snawdor, who refused absolutely to sleep with the windows open.

"What's the sense in working your fingers off to buy coal to heat the house if you go an' let out all the hot air over night?" she demanded.

"They've filled up yer head with fool notions, but I tell you right now, you ain't goin' to work 'em off on us. You kin just tell that old maid Stanley that when she's had three husbands and five children an' a step, an' managed to live on less'n ten dollars a week, it'll be time enough fer her to be learnin' me tricks!"

"But don't all this mess ever get on your nerves? Don't you ever want to clear out and go to the country?" asked Nance.

"Not me!" said Mrs. Snawdor. "I been fightin' the country all my life.

It's bad enough bein' dirt pore, without goin' an' settin' down among the stumps where there ain't nothin' to take yer mind off it."

So whatever reforms Nance contemplated had to be carried out slowly and with great tact. Mrs. Snawdor, having put forth one supreme effort to make the flat sufficiently decent to warrant Nance's return, proposed for the remainder of her life to rest on her laurels. As for the children, they had grown old enough to have decided opinions of their own, and when Nance threw the weight of her influence on the side of order and cleanliness, she was regarded as a traitor in the camp. It was only Mr.

Snawdor who sought to uphold her, and Mr. Snawdor was but a broken reed.

Meanwhile the all-important question of getting work was under discussion. Miss Stanley had made several tentative suggestions, but none of them met with Mrs. Snawdor's approval.

"No, I ain't goin' to let you work out in private families!" she declared indignantly. "She's got her cheek to ast it! Did you tell her yer pa was a Molloy? An' Mr. Burks says yer maw was even better born than what Bud was. I'm goin' to git you a job myself. I'm goin' to take you up to Clarke's this very evenin'."

"I don't want to work in a factory!" Nance said discontentedly, looking out of the window into the dirty court below.

"I suppose you want to run a beauty parlor," said Mrs. Snawdor, with scornful reference to Nance's improved appearance. "You might just as well come off them high stilts an' stop puttin' on airs, Dan Lewis has been up to Clarke's goin' on four years now. I hear they're pus.h.i.+n' him right along."

Nance stopped drumming on the window-pane and became suddenly interested.

The one thing that had reconciled her to leaving Miss Stanley and the girls at the home was the possibility of seeing Dan again. She wondered what he looked like after these four years, whether he would recognize her, whether he had a sweetheart? She had been home three days now and had caught no glimpse of him.

"We never see nothin' of him," her stepmother told her. "He's took up with the Methodists, an' runs around to meetin's an' things with that there Mis' Purdy."

"Don't he live over Slap Jack's?" asked Nance.

"Yes; he's got his room there still. I hear his ma died las' spring.

Flirtin' with the angels by now, I reckon."

The prospect of seeing Dan cheered Nance amazingly. She spent the morning was.h.i.+ng and ironing her best s.h.i.+rt-waist and turning the ribbon on her tam-o'-shanter. Every detail of her toilet received scrupulous attention.

It was raining dismally when she and Mrs. Snawdor picked their way across the factory yard that afternoon. The conglomerate ma.s.s of buildings known as "Clarke's" loomed somberly against the dull sky. Beside the low central building a huge gas-pipe towered, and the water, trickling down it, made a puddle through which they had to wade to reach the door of the furnace room.

Within they could see the huge, round furnace with its belt of small fiery doors, from which gla.s.s-blowers, with long blow-pipes were deftly taking small lumps of moulten gla.s.s and blowing them into b.a.l.l.s.

"There's Dan!" cried Mrs. Snawdor, and Nance looked eagerly in the direction indicated.

In the red glare of the furnace, a big, awkward, bare-armed young fellow was just turning to roll his red-hot ball on a board. There was a steady look in the gray eyes that scowled slightly under the intense glare, a sure movement of the hands that dropped the elongated roll into the mold. When he saw Mrs. Snawdor's beckoning finger, he came to the door.

"This here is Nance Molloy," said Mrs. Snawdor by way of introduction.

"She's about growed up sence you seen her. We come to see about gittin'

her a job."

Nance, looking at the strange, stern face above her, withdrew the hand she had held out. Dan did not seem to see her hand any more than he saw her fresh s.h.i.+rt-waist and the hat she had taken so much pains to retrim.

After a casual nod he stood looking at the floor and rubbing the toe of his heavy boot against his blow-pipe.

"Sure," he said slowly, "but this is no fit place for a girl, Mrs.