Three of the busiest portions of New York, varying with the various
hours of the day, may safely be said to lie in that neighborhood where
Nassau Street debouches into Park Row, and also near that point where
Twenty-third Street intercepts Fourth Avenue, and still again not far
from where Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet at the southeast corner of
Madison Square.
About these three points, at certain hours of the day and on certain
days of the week, an observant stranger might have noticed the
strangely grotesque figure of an old cement seller. So often had this
old street-peddler duly appeared at his stand, from month to month,
that the hurrying public seemed to have become inured to the
grotesqueness of his appearance. Seldom, indeed, did a face turn to
inspect him as he blinked out at the lighted street like a Pribiloff
seal blinking into an Arctic sun. Yet it was only by a second or even
a third glance that the more inquisitive might have detected anything
arresting in that forlornly ruminative figure with the pendulous and
withered throat and cheek-flaps.
To the casual observer he was merely a picturesque old street-peddler,
standing like a time-stained statue beside a carefully arrayed exhibit
of his wares. This exhibit, which invariably proved more interesting
than his own person, consisted of a frame of gas-piping in the form of
an inverted U. From the top bar of this iron frame swung two heavy
pieces of leather cemented together. Next to this coalesced leather
dangled a large Z made up of three pieces of plate glass stuck together
at the ends, and amply demonstrating the adhesive power of the
cementing mixture to be purchased there.
Next to the glass Z again were two rows of chipped and serrated plates
and saucers, plates and saucers of all kinds and colors, with holes
drilled in their edges, and held together like a suspended chain-gang
by small brass links. At some time in its career each one of these
cups and saucers had been broken across or even shattered into
fragments. Later, it had been ingeniously and patiently glued
together. And there it and its valiant brothers in misfortune swung
together in a double row, with a cobblestone dangling from the bottom
plate, reminding the passing world of remedial beneficences it might
too readily forget, attesting to the fact that life's worst fractures
might in some way still be made whole.
Yet so impassively, so stolidly statuesque, did this figure stand
beside the gas-pipe that to all intents he might have been cemented to
the pavement with his own glue. He seldom moved, once his frame had
been set up and his wares laid out. When he did move it was only to
re-awaken the equally plethoric motion of his slowly oscillating links
of cemented glass and chinaware. Sometimes, it is true, he disposed of
a phial of his cement, producing his bottle and receiving payment with
the absorbed impassivity of an automaton.
Huge as his figure must once have been, it now seemed, like his
gibbeted plates, all battered and chipped and over-written with the
marks of time. Like his plates, too, he carried some valiant sense of
being still intact, still stubbornly united, still oblivious of every
old-time fracture, still bound up into personal compactness by some
power which defied the blows of destiny.
In all seasons, winter and summer, apparently, he wore a long and
loose-fitting overcoat. This overcoat must once have been black, but
it had faded to a green so conspicuous that it made him seem like a
bronze figure touched with the mellowing _patina_ of time.
It was in the incredibly voluminous pockets of this overcoat that the
old peddler carried his stock in trade, paper-wrapped bottles of
different sizes, and the nickels and dimes and quarters of his daily
trafficking. And as the streams of life purled past him, like water
past a stone, he seemed to ask nothing of the world on which he looked
out with such deep-set and impassive eyes. He seemed content with his
lot. He seemed to have achieved a Nirvana-like indifferency towards
all his kind.
Yet there were times, as he waited beside his stand, as lethargic as a
lobster in a fish-peddler's window, when his flaccid, exploring fingers
dug deeper into one of those capacious side-pockets and there came in
contact with two oddly shaped wristlets of polished steel. At such
times his intent eyes would film, as the eyes of a caged eagle
sometimes do. Sometimes, too, he would smile with the half-pensive
Castilian smile of an uncouth and corpulent Cervantes.
But as a rule his face was expressionless. About the entire moss-green
figure seemed something faded and futile, like a street-lamp left
burning after sunrise. At other times, as the patrolman on the beat
sauntered by in his authoritative blue stippled with its metal buttons,
the old peddler's watching eyes would wander wistfully after the
nonchalant figure. At such times a meditative and melancholy
intentness would fix itself on the faded old face, and the stooping old
shoulders would even unconsciously heave with a sigh.
As a rule, however, the great green-clad figure with its fringe of
white hair--the fringe that stood blithely out from the faded hat brim
like the halo of some medieval saint on a missal--did not permit his
gaze to wander so far afield.
For, idle as that figure seemed, the brain behind it was forever
active, forever vigilant and alert. The deep-set eyes under their lids
that hung as loose as old parchment were always fixed on the life that
flowed past them. No face, as those eyes opened and closed like the
gills of a dying fish, escaped their inspection. Every man who came
within their range of vision was duly examined and adjudicated. Every
human atom of that forever ebbing and flowing tide of life had to pass
through an invisible screen of inspection, had in some intangible way
to justify itself as it proceeded on its unknown movement towards an
unknown end. And on the loose-skinned and haggard face, had it been
studied closely enough, could have been seen a vague and wistful note
of expectancy, a guarded and muffled sense of anticipation.
Yet to-day, as on all other days, nobody stopped to study the old
cement-seller's face. The pink-cheeked young patrolman, swinging back
on his beat, tattooed with his ash night-stick on the gas-pipe frame
and peered indifferently down at the battered and gibbeted crockery.
"Hello, Batty," he said as he set the exhibit oscillating with a push
of the knee. "How 's business?"
"Pretty good," answered the patient and guttural voice. But the eyes
that seemed as calm as a cow's eyes did not look at the patrolman as he
spoke.
He had nothing to fear. He knew that he had his license. He knew that
under the faded green of his overcoat was an oval-shaped
street-peddler's badge. He also knew, which the patrolman did not,
that under the lapel of his inner coat was a badge of another shape and
design, the badge which season by season the indulgent new head of the
Detective Bureau extended to him with his further privilege of a
special officer's license. For this empty honor "Batty" Blake--for as
"Batty" he was known to nearly all the cities of America--did an
occasional bit of "stooling" for the Central Office, a tip as to a
stray yeggman's return, a hint as to a "peterman's" activities in the
shopping crowds, a whisper that a till tapper had failed to respect the
Department's dead-lines.
Yet nobody took Batty Blake seriously. It was said, indeed, that once,
in the old regime, he had been a big man in the Department. But that
Department had known many changes, and where life is unduly active,
memory is apt to be unduly short.
The patrolman tapping on the gas-pipe arch with his idle night-stick
merely knew that Batty was placid and inoffensive, that he never
obstructed traffic and always carried a license-badge. He knew that in
damp weather Batty limped and confessed that his leg pained him a bit,
from an old hurt he 'd had in the East. And he had heard somewhere
that Batty was a sort of Wandering Jew, patroling the whole length of
the continent with his broken plates and his gas-pipe frame and his
glue-bottles, migrating restlessly from city to city, striking out as
far west as San Francisco, swinging round by Denver and New Orleans and
then working his way northward again up to St. Louis and Chicago and
Pittsburgh.
Remembering these things the idle young "flatty" turned and looked at
the green-coated and sunken-shouldered figure, touched into some rough
pity by the wordless pathos of an existence which seemed without aim or
reason.
"Batty, how long 're yuh going to peddle glue, anyway?" he suddenly
asked.
The glue-peddler, watching the crowds that drifted by him, did not
answer. He did not even look about at his interrogator.
"D' yuh _have_ to do this?" asked the wide-shouldered youth in uniform.
"No," was the peddler's mild yet guttural response.
The other prodded with his night-stick against the capacious overcoat
pockets. Then he laughed.
"I'll bet yuh 've got about forty dollars stowed away in there," he
mocked. "Yuh have now, have n't yuh?"
"I don' know!" listlessly answered the sunken-shouldered figure.
"Then what 're yuh sellin' this stuff for, if it ain't for money?"
persisted the vaguely piqued youth.
"I don' know!" was the apathetic answer.
"Then who does?" inquired the indolent young officer, as he stood
humming and rocking on his heels and swinging his stick by its
wrist-thong.
The man known as Batty may or may not have been about to answer him.
His lips moved, but no sound came from them. His attention,
apparently, was suddenly directed elsewhere. For approaching him from
the east his eyes had made out the familiar figure of old McCooey, the
oldest plain-clothes man who still came out from Headquarters to "pound
the pavement."
And at almost the same time, approaching him from the west, he had
caught sight of another figure.
It was that of a dapper and thin-faced man who might have been anywhere
from forty to sixty years of age. He walked, however, with a quick and
nervous step. Yet the most remarkable thing about him seemed to be his
eyes. They were wide-set and protuberant, like a bird's, as though
years of being hunted had equipped him with the animal-like faculty of
determining without actually looking back just who might be following
him.
Those alert and wide-set eyes, in fact, must have sighted McCooey at
the same time that he fell under the vision of the old cement seller.
For the dapper figure wheeled quietly and quickly about and stooped
down at the very side of the humming patrolman. He stooped and
examined one of the peddler's many-fractured china plates. He squinted
down at it as though it were a thing of intense interest to him.
As he stooped there the humming patrolman was the witness of a
remarkable and inexplicable occurrence. From the throat of the
huge-shouldered peddler, not two paces away from him, he heard come a
hoarse and brutish cry, a cry strangely like the bawl and groan of a
branded range-cow. At the same moment the gigantic green-draped figure
exploded into sudden activity. He seemed to catapult out at the
stooping dapper figure, bearing it to the sidewalk with the sheer
weight of his unprovoked assault.
There the struggle continued. There the two strangely diverse bodies
twisted and panted and writhed. There the startlingly agile dapper
figure struggled to throw off his captor. The arch of gas-pipe went
over. Glue-bottles showered amid the shattered glass and crockery.
But that once placid-eyed old cement seller struck to the unoffending
man he had so promptly and so gratuitously attacked, stuck to him as
though he had been glued there with his own cement. And before the
patrolman could tug the combatants apart, or even wedge an arm into the
fight, the exulting green-coated figure had his enemy on his back along
the curb, and, reaching down into his capacious pocket, drew out two
oddly shaped steel wristlets. Forcing up his captive's arm, he
promptly snapped one steel wring on his own wrist, and one on the wrist
of the still prostrate man.
"What 're yuh tryin' to do?" demanded the amazed officer, still tugging
at the great figure holding down the smaller man. In the encounter
between those two embattled enemies had lurked an intensity of passion
which he could not understand, which seemed strangely akin to insanity
itself.
It was only when McCooey pushed his way in through the crowd and put a
hand on his shoulder that the old cement seller slowly rose to his
feet. He was still panting and blowing. But as he lifted his face up
to the sky his body rumbled with a Jove-like sound that was not
altogether a cough of lungs overtaxed nor altogether a laugh of triumph.
"I got him!" he gasped.
About his once placid old eyes, which the hardened tear-ducts no longer
seemed able to drain of their moisture, was a look of exultation that
made the gathering street-crowd take him for a panhandler gone mad with
hunger.
"Yuh got _who_?" cried the indignant young officer, wheeling the bigger
man about on his feet. As the cement seller, responding to that tug,
pivoted about, it was noticeable that the man to whom his wrist was
locked by the band of steel duly duplicated the movement. He moved
when the other moved; he drew aside when the other drew aside, as
though they were now two parts of one organism.
"I got him!" calmly repeated the old street-peddler.
"Yuh got _who_?" demanded the still puzzled young patrolman, oblivious
of the quiescent light in the bewildered eyes of McCooey, close beside
him.
"Binhart!" answered Never-Fail Blake, with a sob. "_I 've got
Binhart_!"