She looked at him with liquid brown eyes over her shoulder.

“Anything better there than there was last night?” she asked.

Nucky nodded eagerly.  “You’ll be surprised when you see the bird I got lined up.”

Liz looked cautiously round the park, at the children shouting on the wet pavements, at the sparrows quarreling in the dirty snow drifts.  Then she started, nervously, along the path.

“There comes Foley!” she exclaimed.  “What’s he doin’ off his beat?”

“He’s seen us now,” said Nucky.  “We might as well stand right here.”

“Oh, I ain’t afraid of that guy!” Liz tossed her head.  “I got things on him, all right.”

“Why don’t you use ’em?” Nucky’s voice was skeptical.  “He’s going down Waverly Place, the blank, blank!”

Liz grunted.  “He’s got too much on me!  I ain’t hopin’ to start trouble.  You go chase yourself, Nucky.  I’ll be round about midnight.”

Nucky’s chasing himself consisted of the purchase of a newspaper which he read for a few minutes in the sunshine of the park.  Even as he sat on the park bench, apparently absorbed in the paper, there was an air of sullen unhappiness about the boy.  Finally, he tossed the paper aside, and sat with folded arms, his chin on his breast.

Officer Foley, standing on the corner of Washington Place and MacDougal Street waved a pleasant salute to a tall, gray-haired man whose automobile drew up before the corner apartment house.

“How are you, Mr. Seaton?” he asked.

“Rather used up, Foley!” replied the gentleman, “Rather used up!  Aren’t you off your beat?”

The officer nodded.  “Had business up here and started back.  Then I stopped to watch that red-headed kid over there.”  He indicated the bench on which Nucky sat, all unconscious of the sharp eyes fastened on his back.

“I see the red hair, anyway,”—­Mr. Seaton lighted a cigar and puffed it slowly.  He and Foley had been friends during Seaton’s twenty years’ residence on the Square.

“I know you ain’t been keen on boys since you lost Jack,” the officer said, slowly, “but—­well, I can’t get this young Nucky off my mind, blast the little crook!”

“So he’s a crook, is he?  How old is the boy?”

“Oh, ’round fourteen!  He’s as smart as lightning and as crooked as he is smart.  He turned up here when he was a little kid, with a woman who may or may not have been his mother.  She lived with a Dago down in Minetta Lane.  Guess the boy mighta been six years old when she died and Luigi took him on.  We were all kind of proud of him at first.  Teachers in school all said he was a wonder.  But for two or three years he’s been going wrong, stealing and gambling, and now this fellow Luigi’s started a den on his second floor that we gotta clean out soon.  His rag-picking’s a stall.  And he’s using Nucky like a kid oughtn’t to be used.”

“Why don’t you people have him taken away from the Italian and a proper guardian appointed?”