Chapter 1

Even a hard-boiled, hard-eyed, hard-swearing traffic regulator may have his moments. Officer James Emmet Corcoran had four each week day.

Shortly before nine o’clock each morning a silken little lady in a silky little roadster went by. This moment was merely the curtain raiser to the other three; for at her initial appearance Officer Corcoran was forced to content himself with a view of her golden red bob.

In the morning she wore a coat that concealed her satin-white arm, but at noon that member curved graciously smooth and bare. When twelve o’clock sounded on distant whistles, Corcoran imperiously put east and west traffic back on its tail. Heedless of lurid objurgation, he kept the north avenue open, and permitted the south-bound stream to trickle along until a glowing aura of red showed through the wind shield of the tricky roadster.

At just the right moment he faced his six feet three of Irish authority toward the north and waved the grinding gears and gnashing teeth of east and west traffic into the clear. That put the golden red bob on the sidewalk dead line. Thereupon the little lady would press the roadster’s flippantly musical siren and smile. With the gesture of a king in his own right, Corcoran would acknowledge the salutation by again putting the curse upon east and west traffic.

The same maneuver, except that Corcoran faced to the south, was repeated at five minutes to one o’clock. These were the two high moments of the daily four; and at these times Officer Corcoran had the fantastic Irish fancy that he would like to be one of the dancing heat waves quivering upward from the stewing asphalt to caress that alluring arm.

He wondered if his ears were as huge and red as they felt when he closed his eyes for a fleeting second or two and figuratively rested his head, with its unruly black thatch, against the cushion of the exposed satiny shoulder. Then he would open his eyes and grin back. When she was gone, flashing away in the saucy machine, he would sigh disconsolately.

“Not for such as ye, laddie buck!” he would mutter.

Thereafter, for a brief space, he would permit profane truck drivers and flustered lady gear clashers to fight for their own disputed rights of way. Then he would snap out of it and again put the razz on his dazed customers.

His fourth moment was at four o’clock sharp. To be sure, the aggravating concealment of her lovely shoulder was repeated; but several times, at the end of the day, Officer Corcoran dared to think that her smile held something of wistfulness, of reaching out to him.

Perhaps she was only wearied with her day’s duties, whatever they were; but the smile warmed the heart of the big policeman. It left him dreaming dreams that a traffic dictator with a curly black thatch has no business to dream.

Each morning, however, he would come down into the cold, gray murk of his traffic corner, knowing that she was a creature of another world—a world of luxury, from which silky roadsters with made-to-order musical sirens are materialized; in which only gentlemen born may expect to hear the sweet assent of purring voices that go with bare arms of velvety smoothness.

Officer James Emmet Corcoran had come over in the steerage. He brought with him the most primitive ideas about social distinctions. Removed from his uniformed crust, he was a great, awkward, shy inferiority complex in person.