She perceived the difference between the use and abuse of this pleasant and obvious friend of hungry man, and employed it with enthu-sia**, but discretion.Thus it came about that whoever ate of her dinners, found the meals of other cooks strangely lacking in savor, and remembered with regret the soups and stews, the broiled steaks, and stuffed chickens of the woman who appreciated the onion.
When Nora Finnegan came home with a cold one day, she took it in such a jocular fashion that Tig felt not the least concern about her, and when, two days later, she died of pneumonia, he almost thought, at first, that it must be one of her jokes.She had departed with decision, such as had charac-terized every act of her life, and had made as little trouble for others as possible.When she was dead the community had the oppor-tunity of discovering the number of her friends.Miserable children with faces which revealed two generations of hunger, homeless boys with vicious countenances, miserable wrecks of humanity, women with bloated faces, came to weep over Nora's bier, and to lay a flower there, and to scuttle away, more abjectly lonely than even sin could make them.If the cats and the dogs, the sparrows and horses to which she had shown kindness, could also have attended her funeral, the procession would have been, from a point of numbers, one of the most imposing the city had ever known.Tig used up all their sav-ings to bury her, and the next week, by some peculiar fatality, he had a falling out with the night editor of his paper, and was discharged.
This sank deep into his sensitive soul, and he swore he would be an underling no longer -- which foolish resolution was directly trace-able to his hair, the color of which, it will be recollected, was red.
Not being an underling, he was obliged to make himself into something else, and he recurred passionately to his old idea of be-coming a novelist.He settled down in Nora's basement rooms, went to work on a battered type-writer, did his own cooking, and occasionally pawned something to keep him in food.The environment was calcu-lated to further impress him with the idea of his genius.
A certain magazine offered an alluring prize for a short story, and Tig wrote one, and rewrote it, ****** alterations, revisions, an-notations, and interlineations which would have reflected credit upon Honoré Balzac himself.Then he wrought all together, with splendid brevity and dramatic force, -- Tig's own words, -- and mailed the same.He was convinced he would get the prize.He was just as much convinced of it as Nora Finne-gan would have been if she had been with him.
So he went about doing more fiction, tak-ing no especial care of himself, and wrapt in rosy dreams, which, not being warm enough for the weather, permitted him to come down with rheumatic fever.
He lay alone in his room and suffered such torments as the condemned and rheumatic know, depending on one of Nora's former friends to come in twice a day and keep up the fire for him.This friend was aged ten, and looked like a sparrow who had been in a cyclone, but somewhere inside his bones was a wit which had spelled out devotion.
He found fuel for the cracked stove, some-how or other.He brought it in a dirty sack which he carried on his back, and he kept warmth in Tig's miserable body.Moreover, he found food of a sort -- cold, horrible bits often, and Tig wept when he saw them, remembering the meals Nora had served him.
