On Monday night the foreman at the livery stable of the ice company appointed Hefty a driver, and, as his wages would now be fifteen dollars a week, he concluded to ask Mary to marry him on Wednesday night at the dance.

He was very much elated and very happy.

His fellow-workmen heard of his promotion and insisted on his standing treat, which he did several times, until the others became flippant in their remarks and careless in their conduct.  In this innocent but somewhat noisy state they started home, and on the way were injudicious enough to say, “Ah there!” to a policeman as he issued from the side door of a saloon.  The policeman naturally pounded the nearest of them on the head with his club, and as Hefty happened to be that one, and as he objected, he was arrested.  He gave a false name, and next morning pleaded not guilty to the charge of “assaulting an officer and causing a crowd to collect.”

His sentence was thirty days in default of three hundred dollars, and by two o’clock he was on the boat to the Island, and by three he had discarded the blue shirt and red suspenders of an iceman for the gray stiff cloth of a prisoner.  He took the whole trouble terribly to heart.  He knew that if Old Man Casey, as he called him, heard of it there would be no winning his daughter with his consent, and he feared that the girl herself would have grave doubts concerning him.  He was especially cast down when he thought of the dance on Wednesday night, and of how she would go off with Patsy Moffat.  And what made it worse was the thought that if he did not return he would lose his position at the ice company’s stable, and then marriage with Mary would be quite impossible.  He grieved over this all day, and speculated as to what his family would think of him.  His circle of friends was so well known to other mutual friends that he did not dare to ask any of them to bail him out, for this would have certainly come to Casey’s ears.

He could do nothing but wait.  And yet thirty days was a significant number to his friends, and an absence of that duration would be hard to explain.  On Wednesday morning, two days after his arrest, he was put to work with a gang of twenty men breaking stone on the roadway that leads from the insane quarters to the penitentiary.  It was a warm, sunny day, and the city, lying just across the narrow channel, never looked more beautiful.  It seemed near enough for him to reach out his hand and touch it.  And the private yachts and big excursion-boats that passed, banging out popular airs and alive with bunting, made Hefty feel very bitter.  He determined that when he got back he would go look up the policeman who had assaulted him and break his head with a brick in a stocking.  This plan cheered him somewhat, until he thought again of Mary Casey at the dance that night with Patsy Moffat, and this excited him so that he determined madly to break away and escape.  His first impulse was to drop his crowbar and jump into the river on the instant, but his cooler judgment decided him to wait.