Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/169

 She reached the basement without discovery or interruption. There, on a row of hooks beside the door, she saw a widow's bonnet, a pair of oil-stained overalls and a faded plaid shawl. The shawl she quickly threw over her shoulders. The overalls she promptly stuffed down into her laundry bag. Then she stopped for a minute with a mouthful of hairpins, while she twisted her hair tightly together, and pinned it flat above her ears. Then she let herself out through the door, stepped across the area, and mounted to the sidewalk.

As she had expected, a blue-coated officer was posted between her and the street-corner to the west. To the east, half way down the block, stood an empty taxi-cab and a scattering of curious onlookers. Here and there she could see still more blue-coated figures. She gaped at them for a moment, chewing vacantly on an imaginary cud of gum. Then she turned about and shambled westward, hitching at her skirt as she went. She was looking straight up, squinting vacantly at the blue sky above her, as she approached the idle officer. He stared at her for a moment, without perceptible hostility, and went on swinging his night-stick. Once she was past that swinging night-stick, she took a deep breath. And, once she had rounded the corner, she quickened her pace, crossed the street, went north for a block, struck west again, rounded still another corner, and slipped quietly into the family entrance of a corner saloon, where, having sought out the telephone, she expeditiously exhumed a hidden pocketbook and sent across the city a hurried call for assistance.