Behind a screen of barrels in the corner of the alley Cake ate the broken meats herself, taking what comfort she could, and pondering the while the awful problem of securing the booze, since she must be taught, and since the lodger moved in her sphere as the only available teacher.

There was a rush up the alley past her hiding-place, a shout, and the savage thud of blows.  Very cautiously, as became one wise in the ways of life in that place, Cake peered around a barrel.  She saw Red Dan, who sold papers in front of Jeer Dooley’s place, thoroughly punishing another and much larger boy.  The bigger boy was crying.

“Anybody c’n sell pipers,” shouted Red Dan, pounding the information home bloodily.  “You hear me?—­anybody!”

Cake crept out of her hiding-place on the opposite side.

She did not care what happened to the bigger boy, though she respected Red Dan the more.  She knew where the money was going to come from to buy the lodger’s booze.  It meant longer hours for her; it meant care to work only out of school hours; it meant harder knocks than even she had experienced; it meant a fatigue there were no words to describe even among the beautiful, wonderful, colourful ones the lodger taught her.  But she sold the papers and she purchased the booze.

Her mother did not know where she spent this extra time.  She did not care since the money came in from Maverick’s steadily each week.  Neither did the lodger care how the booze was procured; the big thing to him was that it came.

At first these lessons were fun for him; the big, gawky, half-starved, overworked child seeing so vividly in pictures all that he told her in words.  Full-fed on the scraps from Maverick’s—­he was no longer fastidious—­well stimulated by the drink she brought, he took an ugly sort of degraded pleasure in posturing before her, acting as he alone could act those most wonderful of all plays, watching with hateful, sardonic amusement the light and shadow of emotion upon her dirty face.  Oh, he was a magician, no doubt at all of that!  Past master in the rare art of a true genius, that of producing illusion.

Then he would make Cake try, rave at her, curse her, strike her, kill himself laughing, drink some more and put her at it again.

Night after night, almost comatose from the fatigue of a day that began while it was still dark, she carried a heaped-up plate and a full bottle to the lodger’s room and sat down upon the dry-goods box with the candle beside her on the floor.  And, having thus secured her welcome, night after night she walked with him among that greatest of all throngs of soldiers and lovers, kings and cardinals, queens, prostitutes and thieves.

If the liquor was short in the bottle a dime’s worth, the lesson was curtailed.  At first Cake tried to coax him.  “Aw, c’mon, yuh Romeo on th’ street in Mantua.”

But the lodger was never so drunk that he made the slightest concession.