On a mellow evening a week later, Alderman Perkins stood on the front porch of his house and contemplated a tranquil street. The front door stood open behind him, admitting the soft air to the house through a screen door; the street was streaming with golden sunset light and patterned along its curbstones with the shadows of oak and maple trees. He looked upon this prospect with the feeling that he had not seen it in some time, though it lay outside his windows every evening. He looked at his neighbors’ houses, and listened to the voices drifting from other yards and front-porches, and wondered just how many things had been passing him by unawares. The events of the past seven days had done a good deal to jar him from the absent concentration he had lived in so long, and he was still looking round him with an air of just having woken.
He still had not outlived the sensation of that night a week ago, when at past eleven o’clock he had been confronted in his library by the apparition of his daughter, wearing a boy’s sweater crookedly over a bedraggled party dress, accompanied by a strange boy and pouring out a tensely stammering confession—of what he could not grasp at first; he could not adjust that quickly to the notion that she had been abroad at night rather than safely in bed upstairs.
When he conquered this amazement his first reaction was to be brusque. “I’m afraid I don’t understand you,” he said. He directed a sharply questioning glance at the tall boy who stood behind Dorothy’s shoulder, watching both of them with a wary expression. “Begin at the beginning, please. Who is this? What is he doing here?”
“I’ll go, if you want me to,” the boy said, half turning toward the door.
But Dorothy clutched at his arm in an almost panicked way, stopping him. “No, please don’t go,” she said under her breath, a tense quiver in the words. Perkins saw and heard, and it stopped him in what he had been about to say. It struck him in both the gesture and the tone that his daughter was actually afraid of him.
The revelation did him good in the moments that followed, for instead of questioning as he had intended he stood perfectly still and watched his daughter as she tremulously but resolutely made her confession. The Lost Lake House, the nightly escapades, the police raid—he heard it all with an incredulity almost overshadowed by the discovery he had just made. Dorothy kept her head up; her chin trembled slightly and her voice escaped her control once or twice; but she plunged on steadily and looked him in the eye all the time. He noticed the boy watching her from the background—his eyes fixed on her with a look of understanding, almost as if he was silently willing her courage.
When Dorothy spoke of Marshall Kendrick’s part in the night’s events, the Alderman gave him a glance entirely unlike the first one—and once he had heard Marshall’s reason for being there, practicality took over for incredulity for the time being. He moved into action, questioning them both as thoroughly as Dorothy had anticipated, interrupting himself just once to place a swift telephone call to the chief of police. When the chief himself arrived shortly afterwards there was more cross-questioning, more discussion and sensation, as Dorothy and Marshall between them told their story over again. All in all, it was nearly two o’clock before father and daughter were left alone—and as he looked at her, a small untidy figure under the dimness of the last lamp in the front hall, Alderman Perkins realized there were a great many things he wanted to say to Dorothy and even more things he wanted to know, but that two o’clock in the morning was not the time at which to start.
“Go to bed,” he said, putting his arm around her, and drawing her curly head against his shoulder for a moment, “and get some sleep. We’ll have plenty of time to talk in the morning.”
He had never realized before just how talkative Dorothy could be. Seven days had been enough to convince him of that.
As he stood by the edge of the porch thinking of these things, Marshall Kendrick came up the street, whistling a scrap of a tune, and turned in at the front walk to the Perkins’ house.
“Good evening, Marshall,” said Alderman Perkins, as he came up the walk. “Everything went off very satisfactorily last night, I hear?”
“Yes sir. Sure went off with a smash, anyway.”
“I suppose I’m biased,” said Perkins. “When you’ve been throwing stones at a particular pane of glass for as long as I have, it’s satisfying to hear the smash. Hurt yourself?” He nodded toward Marshall’s right hand, the knuckles of which were bandaged.
“Just a scratch. Nothing much.”
“I will tell you,” said Alderman Perkins, “even though I still think you had every right to claim that reward, that certain people I know have shed ten years over the prospect of not paying it.”
Marshall grinned slightly. “Dorothy said they’d be happy.” He added, with an offhand manner that did not deceive his auditor, “Is Dorothy home?”
Dorothy’s father had seen the flick of a curtain in a window behind him from the corner of his eye, and his private opinion was that Dorothy was at this moment making a quick inspection of herself in the mirror over the parlor mantelpiece, but he kept this to himself. “Yes—yes, she’s at home. I’ll see if I can find her.”
He turned and went into the house; and before the screen door had swung closed, Dorothy shot through it onto the porch and joined Marshall on the steps. “Did you get the job?” she said eagerly.
“I sure did. I saw the foreman today, and I start work on one of the furnaces on Monday.”
“Oh, good! I knew it would work out,” said Dorothy, sitting down on the top step and clasping her hands around her knees. “Did you see Mr. Dalrymple?”
“Only for a minute—he sent me down to the foreman right from his office. He said a recommendation from your father was good enough for him. I don’t know how to thank you, Dorothy.”
“Oh, don’t thank me—it was Dad who talked to him; I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Yes, but it was your idea.”
“No, it wasn’t. You asked Dad about help finding work yourself, just like you said that night.”
“But you suggested the glass factory. Anyway, if it hadn’t been for you I—”
“Oh, Dad would have thought of that anyway. He and Mr. Dalrymple were—”
“You know, I’m getting to understand you better,” said Marshall good-humoredly, sitting down on one of the lower steps and leaning back with his elbows on the next one. “You like arguing just for the fun of it. I’m not going to take it personally any more.”
In the hall, Alderman Perkins paused on the point of going into the library and looked back toward the golden-lit screen door, listening for a moment to the sound of animated young voices on the porch, and smiled to himself a touch regretfully. He liked that boy—he had seldom met anyone he liked better on short acquaintance—but it was a little hard having Dorothy’s attention diverted elsewhere just as he was beginning to think he should get better acquainted with her. Ah, well…his own fault for being a little late.
Dorothy and Marshall sat on the porch steps and talked as the sunset light faded slowly, and the soft indistinctness of evening settled over the street. Marshall told her about the final police raid on the Lost Lake House, which he had witnessed accomplished with great chaos the night before.
“Nobody had the least idea it was going to happen, so soon after the last one. When the police went straight to the secret doors, everybody knew the game was up, and the whole place went to pieces. The waiters ran like rabbits, and all the bootlegging crew tried to get off the island. Bill Harolday got hold of a boat somehow, but he didn’t get far—the cops were waiting for him on the other shore. But Maurice Vernon got away. He wasn’t on the island at all. Somehow he got wind of what happened, and by the time the police got round to his house and his office he wasn’t there. Nobody knows where he disappeared to.”
“I saw that in the paper,” said Dorothy. “Do you think he suspected at all? That it was you, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Marshall. “I don’t even know whether I hope he didn’t or not. Does that sound crazy to you?”
“No,” said Dorothy, putting her chin thoughtfully in her hand. “I think I know just how you feel. Marsh, what happened to your hand?”
Marshall glanced at his bandaged hand, and moved it half out of sight. “Oh, nothing; I just split the knuckles a little.”
“How?” demanded Dorothy, more inquisitive than her father.
“I hit somebody last night.”
“Last night! Good gosh, you didn’t hit a policeman?”
“Heck, no, a guest,” said Marshall. “There was a lot of crowding going on in the halls, once they’d broken open the speakeasy—I sort of shoved him, and he didn’t take it kindly. He—well, he took a swing at me, and so I hit him. I think I knocked one of his front teeth crooked,” he added with some satisfaction.
Dorothy eyed him with a suspicious glimmer of mischief. “You sort of shoved him,” she said. “Marsh, you did it on purpose!”
Marshall tried to look and sound aggrieved, but could not entirely keep the ghost of a grin from showing through. “Well, gee whiz, Dorothy, I’ve been wanting to sock that Sloop Jackson in the jaw ever since the first time I saw him.”