The week after Nance and Dan had reported to Mrs. Purdy, rumor traveled
from house to house and from room to room that the rent man was putting
the Lewises out. The piquant element in the situation lay in the absence
of the chief actor. "Mis' Lewis" herself had disappeared, and nobody knew
where she was or when she would return.
For many years the little cottage, sandwiched between Mr. Snawdor's "Bung
and Fawcett" shop and Slap Jack's saloon had been the scandal and, it
must be confessed the romance of the alley. It stood behind closed
shutters, enveloped in mystery, and no visitor ventured beyond its
threshold. The slender, veiled lady who flitted in and out at queer
hours, and whom rumor actually accused of sometimes arriving at the
corner in "a hack," was, despite ten years' residence, a complete
stranger to her neighbors. She was quiet and well-behaved; she wore good
clothes and shamefully neglected her child. These were the meager facts
upon which gossip built a tower of conjecture.
As for Dan, he was as familiar an object in the alley as the sparrows in
the gutter or the stray cats about the garbage cans. Ever since he could
persuade his small legs to go the way he wanted them to, he had pursued
his own course, asking nothing of anybody, fighting for his meager
rights, and becoming an adept in evading the questions that seemed to
constitute the entire conversation of the adult world. All that he asked
of life was the chance to make a living, and this the authorities sternly
forbade until he should reach that advanced age of fourteen which seemed
to recede as he approached.
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