第37章 GAIN,OR LOSS?(3)(3 / 3)

Will you come help me,quick?I've only got one arm or I would n't have had to ask for help."An empty sleeve was flapping in the rain,and Fenneben did not notice then that the man kept that side of himself all the time in the shadows.

Fenneben had only one thought as he hurried away in the darkness,to save the woman and child.His companion said little,directing the course toward the bend in the river before the gateway of Pigeon Place.As they pushed on with all speed through rain and mud,Fenneben was hardly conscious that Dennie Saxon's words about the lonely gray-haired hermit woman were recurring curiously to his mind.

"If talking about Sunrise made her cry like that,maybe you might do something for her,"Dennie had said.He had never tried to do anything for her.

Somehow she seemed to be the woman who was in peril now,and he was half-consciously blaming himself that he had never tried to help her,had not even thought of her for months.Women were not in his line,except the kindly impersonal interest he felt for all the Sunrise girls,and his sense of responsibility for Norrie,and the memory of a girl--oh,the hungry haunting memory!

All this in a semi-conscious fleetness swept across his mind,that was bent on reaching the river,and on that woman holding a drowning child.

At the bend in the river,the man halted suddenly.