ing for nothing. My husband won't be home tonight."
I said I would get in touch with him at the Herald in the morning.
I went away wondering why the green toe of her left slipper was dark and damp with something that could have been blood.
***
I WALKED over to Broadway and caught a street car. Three blocks north of my hotel I got off to see what the crowd was doing around a side entrance of the City Hall.
Thirty or forty men and a sprinkling of women stood on the sidewalk looking at a door marked Police Department. There were men from mines and smelters still in their working clothes, gaudy boys from pool rooms and dance halls, sleek men with slick pale faces, men with the dull look of respectable husbands, a few just as respectable and dull women, and some ladies of the night.
On the edge of this congregation I stopped beside a square-set man in rumpled gray clothes. His face was grayish too, even the thick lips, though he wasn't much older than thirty. His face was broad, thick-featured and intelligent. For color he depended on a red windsor tie that blossomed over his gray flannel shirt.
"What's the rumpus?" I asked him.
He looked at me carefully before he replied, as if he wanted to be sure that the information was going
