Part 7 (2/2)

The next night the trap was set. Snakey went to One-eyed Angeline, and promised her a share in the gallon, if she would contrive a plan to get Smoky Sal out of the House of Industry, and get her over to Cale Jones's, and get her drunk.

These two had long been sisters in sin. One had reformed, or was trying to reform, for Reagan had got her into the House, and seemed very anxious for her, having, as he said, been the cause of her downfall. The other hated her for her reformation, and would drag her back, down, down, to the wretched life she had escaped from.

So she sent word to Sally that she was sick and almost dying, and begged her to come and see her. How could she refuse? So she went, and found her with her head tied up, and in dreadful pain. Directly in came Snakey Jo, with the first installment of the gallon. It was to bathe her head.

Can an old inebriate put liquor upon the outside of the head without putting it in? Sally could not. She smelt--she tasted--she drank--was drunk--and then Angeline took her down to Cale Jones's grocery, and into his back room, and then that black imp of a worse than slave's master, watched for Reagan as he started for home, and with an air of honesty that might deceive the wariest old fox into a trap, he told him how ”Angeline had coaxed Sally into the grocery, and he had been watching an hour”--that was the only truth he spoke--he watched for another victim--”and she hadn't come out yet, and he was afraid she was in trouble; and now, Mister Reagan, I is so glad I is fell in wid you, accidental like, case I didn't know as you was in the Points, case you can get her out, and get her back home.”

With a natural impulse to do good, he determined, imprudently, to be sure, to do what he had not done since he signed the pledge--to enter a rum-hole. There he found the two women as the negro had told him. Sally was completely overcome, and lying in one corner of ”the back room.”

Back it was, quite out of sight or hearing of the street, where many a victim had been robbed at a game of cards, or by more direct means. It was in this room that Pedlar Jake got his quietus.

”I had been in the room often before,” said Reagan. ”I knew the way, and I paid no heed to the hypocritically angry words I was greeted with as I entered, and told to clear out and mind my own business. I pushed my way through the crowd of loafers, and entered the door of death. That old witch, Angeline, took care to get out of my way as I went in. I sat down upon the bed and tried to rouse up the victim of this infernal plot, little thinking that I was the greatest one of the two. The room was very close and foul, and as I had been unused, lately, to breathe such air, it made me sick. 'Tom,' said I--let me stop and moralize a little upon this name. I would never call a child, Tom. There is something fatal in the word. I have known more drunken Toms than of all other names. It is a low-bred name. Bill, Jim, Joe, Sam, Ike, are all bad, but none equal to Tom.” ”Two of my drunkenest companions,” said Reagan, ”afterwards, my best friends, were Toms--now Thomas Elting and Thomas Nolan.” Parents, don't nickname your children, it is a step down that may carry them to the bottom of the ladder.

Give your children good names; names they will not be ashamed of in after life, and never cut them short. Never call, William, Bill; or, Catherine, Kate; or, Mary, that most beautiful of all names, a name I love, Moll; it will, perhaps, be the direct cause of their ruin as they grow up. Who would think of speaking a foul word to Miss Mary Dudley?

Who would speak with respect to Moll Dud? Parents, think of it.

Now, here was another Tom. A bright, active boy--Tom Top, whose proper name was, Thomas Topham. What if he had been called Charles? why, his nickname would have been an elongation to Charley, a name that everybody loves. At any rate, he would not have been, drunken Tom--a poor, neglected orphan boy, who, for want of some one to guide and keep him in the path of virtue, had strayed into the very worst of all paths of vice. From a home, where he received a fair education, and had a good mother, but a father who learned him to drink, and who thought it cunning to call him, Tom Top, he was come down to be a mere hanger-on around Cale Jones's grocery.

”G.o.d never works without an object,” is an axiom of those who look every day to him for counsel. We shall see in time how the villain was defeated in his object of bringing Reagan into this place, and making use of Tom for an instrument of his ruin.

”'Tom,' said I, 'bring me a gla.s.s of water.' He did so, I tasted it and set it down a moment for the ice to melt. When I took it up again, I swallowed the whole tumbler full at a gulph. In a moment my throat, my stomach, my brain were on fire. I had drank half-a-pint of white whiskey. Those wicked wretches had hired Tom to subst.i.tute one gla.s.s for the other. What transpired for three days after, I know not.”

The next morning, before sunrise, his wife came down to the Points in an agony of fear. ”Was Reagan there?” was her hopeful inquiry. Hope sunk and almost carried her with it when told that he left there before ten to go home. ”Then he is lost, lost, lost!”

All that day he was searched for up and down, high and low, but n.o.body had seen him. How the villains lied, for they were all the time gloating over their victory--double victory--two stray sheep won back--back to the wolf's den. All that day the pack were carousing upon the money robbed from Reagan.

”What a glorious haul, boys,” says Cale Jones, ”we must have Tom Elting and Nolan, next, and then hurrah, boys, we'll break up old Pease and drive him out of the Points yet.”

How could human nature become so infernally depraved, as to rejoice over and glorify such deeds of darkness?

By Rum. The very parent of total depravity.

At night, after their day's work, Elting and Nolan came down and joined the search, looking into every hole that was most likely to have been used for his tomb, worse than tomb, for it was the burial-place of his soul. They did not look in Cale Jones's back room, for he ”took his Bible oath that Jim Reagan had never entered his door in a three month.”

Finally, after the pack had spent every cent of his money, and p.a.w.ned every article of his clothing, they were ready to get rid of his company. But they were not quite satisfied with the misery they had made for his wife, and so they plotted a scheme so wicked that the most incarnate one of all the hosts of the infernal regions would blush to own the deed.

They knew that Sally had been a source of disturbance, a cause of jealousy to his wife in by-gone years, and so they laid their plan.

Madalina, a little beggar girl, an Italian rag-picker's daughter, was promised a sixpence to go, as she would not be suspected, to tell Mrs.

Reagan, that Tom knew where her husband was.

It was a faint hope, but drowning men catch at straws.

Tom was hunted up. He was easily found, for he had his instructions, ”to bring the old woman along.” Did they hope in her frenzy of despair and jealousy that she too would fall? Yes they did.

Could human ingenuity contrive anything more harrowing to the mind of a wife, searching for her absent husband, than an introduction into a room where he was in bed with another woman, folding her, in his drunken insanity, in his arms, protesting how he loved her, loved her better than he did--better than--his grog?

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