The tiny wash-bowl of his room proved a poor substitute with its tepid water and diminutive towel.

He went out and breakfasted carefully as if it were a duty, and then, with his map in his pocket, started out to find his old haunts.

CHAPTER VIII

Thirteen years in New York had brought many changes. Some of the well-remembered landmarks were gone and new buildings in their places. A prosperous-looking saloon quite palatial in its entrance marked the corner where he used to sell papers. It used to be a corner grocery store. Saloons! Always and everywhere there were saloons! Michael looked at them wonderingly. He had quite forgotten them in his exile, for the college influence had barred them out from its vicinity.

The boy Mikky had been familiar enough with saloons, looking upon them as a necessary evil, where drinking fathers spent the money that ought to have bought their children food. He had been in and out of them commonly enough selling his papers, warming his feet, and getting a crust now and then from an uneaten bit on the lunch counter. Sometimes there had been glasses to drain, but Mikky with his observing eyes had early decided that he would have none of the stuff that sent men home to curse their little children.

College influence, while there had been little said on the subject, had filled the boy with horror for saloons and drunkards. He stood appalled now as he turned at last into an alley where familiar objects, doorsteps, turnings, cellars, met his gaze, with grog shops all along the way and sentinelling every corner.

A strange feeling came over him as memory stirred by long-forgotten sights awoke. Was this really the place, and was that opening beyond the third steps the very blind alley where Janie used to live? Things were so much dirtier, so much worse in every way than he remembered them.

He hurried on, not noticing the attention he was attracting from the wretched little children in the gutters, though he scanned them all eagerly, hurriedly, with the wild idea that Buck and the rest might be among them.

Yes, the alley was there, dark and ill-smelling as ever, and in its dim recesses on a dirty step a woman's figure hunched; a figure he knew at once that he had seen before and in that very spot. Who was she? What had they called her? Sally? Aunt Sal?

He hurried up to where she sat looking curiously, apathetically at him; her gray hair straggling down on her dirty cotton frock open at the neck over shrivelled yellow skin; soiled old hands hanging carelessly over slatternly garments; stockingless feet stuck into a great tattered pair of men's shoes. Nothing seemed changed since he saw her last save that the hair had been black then, and the skin not so wrinkled. Aunt Sally had been good-natured always, even when she was drunk; her husband, when he came home was always drunk also, but never good-natured. These things came back to the boy as he stood looking down at the wreck of a woman before him.

The bleary eyes looked up unknowing, half resentful of his intrusion.

“Aunt Sally!” impulsively cried the boyish voice. “Aren't you Aunt Sally?”

The woman looked stupidly surprised.

“I be,” she said thickly, “but wot's that to yous? I beant no hant o' yourn.”

“Don't you remember Mikky?” he asked almost anxiously, for now the feeling had seized him that he must make her remember. He must find out if he could whether anything was known of his origin. Perhaps she could help him. Perhaps, after all, he might be able to trace his family, and find at least no disgrace upon him.

“Mikky!” the woman repeated dully. She shook her head.

“Mikky!” she said again stolidly, “Wot's Mikky?”

“Don't you remember Mikky the little boy that sold papers and brought you water sometimes? Once you gave me a drink of soup from your kettle. Think!”

A dim perception came into the sodden eyes.

“Thur wus a Mikky long ago,” she mused. “He had hair like a h'angel, bless the sweet chile; but he got shot an' never come back. That war long ago.”

Michael took off his hat and the little light in the dark alley seemed to catch and tangle in the gleam of his hair.

The old woman started as though she had seen a vision.

“The saints presarve us!” she cried aghast, shrinking back into her doorway with raised hands, “an' who be yez? Yeh looks enough like the b'y to be the father of 'im. He'd hair loike the verra sunshine itself. Who be yez? Spake quick. Be ye man, b'y, er angel?”

There was something in the woman's tone that went to the heart of the lonely boy, even while he recoiled from the repulsive creature before him.

“I am just Mikky, the boy, grown a little older,” he said gently, “and I've come back to see the place where I used to live, and find the people I used to know.”

“Y've lost yer way thin fer shure!” said the woman slightly recovering her equilibrium. “The loikes uv yous nivver lived in dis place; fer ef yous ain't angel you's gintulmun; an' no gintulmun ivver cum from the loikes o' this. An' besoides, the b'y Mikky, I tel'd yez, was shot an' nivver comed back no more. He's loikely up wid de angels where he b'longs.”

“Yes, I was shot,” said Michael, “but I wasn't killed. A good man sent me to college, and I've just graduated and come back to look up my friends.”

“Frinds, is it, ye'll be afther a findin'? Thin ye'd bist look ilsewhar, fer thur's no one in this alley fit to be frinds with the loikes uv you. Ef that's wot they does with b'ys at co-lidge a pity 'tis more uv um can't git shot an' go there.