The White Moll | Page 5

strange to her ears, there came to
her again now the Bussard's words in which he had paid her tribute on
that morning long ago, and with which he had introduced her to a
shrunken form that lay upon a dirty cot in the barefloored room:
"Meet de moll I was tellin' youse about, Mag. She's white - all de way
up. She's white, Mag; she's a white moll - take it from me."
The White Moll!
The firm little chin came suddenly upward; but into the dark eyes
unbidden came a sudden film and mist. Her father's health had been too
far undermined, and he bad been unable to withstand the shock of the
operation, and he had died in the hospital. There weren't any relatives,

except distant ones on her mother's side, somewhere out in California,
whom she had never seen. She and her father had been all in all to each
other, chums, pals, comrades, since her mother's death many years ago.
She had gone everywhere with him save when the demands of her
education had necessarily kept them apart; she had hunted with him in
South America, ridden with him in sections where civilization was still
in the making, shared the crude, rough life of mining camps with him -
and it had seemed as though her life, too, had gone out with his.
She brushed her hand hastily across her eyes. There hadn't been any
friends either, apart from a few of her father's casual business
acquaintances; no one else - except the Bussard. It was very strange!
Her reward for that one friendly act had come in a manner little
expected, and it had come very quickly. She had sought and found a
genuine relief from her own sorrow in doing what she could to alleviate
the misery in that squalid, one-room home. And then the sphere of her
activities had broadened, slowly at first, not through any preconceived
intention on her part, but naturally, and as almost an inevitable
corollary consequent upon her relations with the Bussard and his
ill-fortuned family.
The Bussard's circle of intimates was amongst those who lay outside
the law, those who gambled for their livelihood by staking their wits, to
win against the toils of the police; and so, more and more, she had
come into close and intimate contact with the criminal element of New
York, until to-day, throughout its length and breadth, she was known,
and, she had reason to believe, was loved and trusted by every crook in
the underworld. It was a strange eulogy, self-pronounced! But it was
none the less true. Then, she had been Rhoda Gray; now, even the
Bussard, doubtless, had forgotten her name in the one with which he
himself, at that queer baptismal font of crimeland, had christened her -
the White Moll. It even went further than that. It embraced what might
be called the entourage of the underworld, the police and the social
workers with whom she inevitably came in contact. These, too, had
long known her as the White Moll, and had come, since she had
volunteered no further information, tacitly to accept her as such, and
nothing more.

Again she shook her head. It wasn't altogether a normal life. She was
only a woman, with all the aspirations of a woman, with all the
yearning of youth for its measure of gayety and pleasure. True, she had
not made a recluse of herself outside her work; but, equally, on the
other hand, she had not made any intimate friends in her own station in
life. She had never purposed continuing indefinitely the work she was
doing, nor did she now; but, little by little, it had forced its claims upon
her until those claims were not easy to ignore. Even though the
circumstances in which her father had left her were barely more than
sufficient for a modest little flat uptown, there was still always a little
surplus, and that surplus counted in certain quarters for very much
indeed. But it wasn't only that. The small amount of money that she
was able to spend in that way had little to do with it. The bonds which
linked her to the sordid surroundings that she had come to know so
well were stronger far than that. There wasn't any money involved in
this visit, for instance, that she was going now to make to Gypsy Nan.
Gypsy Nan was...
Rhoda Gray had halted before the doorway of a small, hovel-like,
two-story building that was jammed in between two tenements, which,
relatively, in their own class, were even more disreputable than was the
little frame house itself. A secondhand-clothes store occupied a portion
of the ground floor, and housed the proprietor and his family as well,
permitting the