Page:Hopkinson Smith--Tom Grogan.djvu/128

 virago, her hair in a frowse about her head, her slatternly dress open at the throat. “Oi'll be one to go an' pull her off the dock and jump on her. What's she a-doin', any-how, puttin' down prices! Ef her ole man had a leg to walk on, instid of his lyin' to-day a cripple in the hospital, he'd be back and be a-runnin' things.”

“She's doin' what she's a right to do,” broke out Mrs. Todd indignantly. Mrs. Todd was the wife of the foreman at the brewery, and an old friend of Tom's. Tom had sat up with her child only the week before. Indeed, there were few women in the tenements, for all their outcry, who did not know how quick had been her hand to help when illness came, or the landlord threatened the sidewalk, or the undertaker insisted on his money in advance.

“It's not Tom Grogan that's crooked,” Mrs. Todd continued, “an' ye all know it. It's that loafer, Dennis Quigg, and that old sneak, Crimmins. They never lifted their hands on a decent job in their lives, an' don't want to. When my man Jack was out of work for four months last winter, and there wasn't a pail of coal in the house, wasn't