ran the story, but whether it was all fancy, or some or most of it, I
could not tell. No one could. One by one, the reporters dropped them,
unable to make them out. The officers of a French benevolent society,
where twice a week they received fixed rations, gave up importuning them
to accept the shelter of the house before their persistent, almost fierce,
refusal. The police did not trouble them, except when people complained
that the tin signs tore their clothes. After that they walked with canvas
posters, and were let alone.
One morning in the winter of 1882, among the police reports of the night's
happenings that were laid upon my desk, I found one saying that Virgile
Dubourque, Frenchman, seventy-five years old, had died in a Wooster-street
lodging-house. The story of his death, as I learned it there that day, was
as tragic as that of his life. He had grown more and more feeble, until at
last he was unable to leave the house. For the first time the son went out
alone. The old man sat by the stove all day, silently brooding over his
wrongs. The lodgers came and went. He heeded neither their going nor their
coming. Through the long night he kept his seat, gazing fixedly into the
fire. In the morning, when daylight shone upon the cold, gray ashes, he
sat there dead. The son slept peacefully beside him.
The old schoolmaster took his last trip alone; no mourners rode behind the
hearse to the Palisade Cemetery, where charitable countrymen bought him a
grave. Erneste did not go to the funeral. That afternoon I met him on
Broadway, plodding alone over the old route. His eyes were red and
swollen. The "protest" hung from his shoulders; in his hand he carried,
done up roughly in a pack, the signs the old man had borne. A look of such
utter loneliness as I had never seen on a human face came into his when I
asked him where his father was. He made a gesture of dejection and shifted
his feet uneasily, as if impatient at being detained. Something distracted
my attention for the moment, and when I looked again he was gone.
Once in the following summer I heard from Erneste through the newspapers,
just when I had begun to miss him from his old haunts. It seems that he
had somehow found the papers that proved his claim, or thought he had. He
had put them into the hands of the French consul the day before, said the
item, appearing before him clothed and in his right mind, without the
signs. But the account merely added to the mystery by hinting that the old
man had unconsciously hoarded the papers all the years he sought them with
such toil in the streets of New York. Here was my story at last; but
before I could lay hold of it, it evaded me once more in the hurry and
worry of the police office.
Autumn had come and nearly gone, when New York was one day startled by
the report that a madman had run through Fourteenth street at an hour in
the afternoon when it was most crowded with shoppers, and, with a pair of
carpenter's compasses, had cut right and left, stabbing as many as came in
his way. A scene of the wildest panic ensued. Women flung themselves down
basement-steps and fell fainting in doorways. Fully half a score were cut
down, among them the wife of Policeman Hanley, who was on duty in the
block, and who arrested the maniac without knowing that his wife lay
mortally wounded among his victims. She had come out to meet him, with the
children. It was only after he had attended to the rest and sent the
prisoner away securely bound that he was told there was still a wounded
woman in the next store, and found her there with her little ones.
The madman was Erneste Dubourque. I found him in the police station,
surrounded by a crowd of excited officials, to whose inquiries he turned a
mien of dull and stolid indifference. He knew me when I called him by
name, and looked up with a movement of quick intelligence, as one who
suddenly remembers something he had forgotten and vainly tried to recall.
He started for the door. When they seized him and brought him back, he
fought like a demon. His shrieks of "Thieves! robbers!" filled the
building as they bore him struggling to a cell.
He was tried by a jury and acquitted of murder. The defense was insanity.
The court ordered his incarceration in a safe asylum. The police had
received a severe lesson, and during the next month, while it was yet
fresh in the public mind, they bestirred themselves, and sent a number of
"harmless" lunatics, who had gone about unmolested, after him. I never
heard of Erneste Dubourque again; but even now, after fifteen years, I
find myself sometimes asking the old question: What was the story of wrong
that bore such a crop of sorrow and darkness and murder?
ABE'S GAME OF JACKS
Time hung heavily on Abe Seelig's hands, alone, or as good as alone, in
the flat on the "stoop" of the Allen-street tenement. His mother had gone
to the butcher's. Chajim, the father,--"Chajim" is the Yiddish of
"Herman,"--was long at the shop. To Abe was committed the care of his two
young brothers, Isaac and Jacob. Abraham was nine, and past time for
fooling. Play is "fooling" in the sweaters' tenements, and the muddling of
ideas makes trouble, later on, to which the police returns have the index.
"Don't let 'em on the stairs," the mother had said, on going, with a
warning nod toward the bed where Jake and Ikey slept. He didn't intend to.
Besides, they were fast asleep. Abe cast about him for fun of some kind,
and bethought himself of a game of jacks. That he had no jackstones was
of small moment to him. East-Side tenements, where pennies are infrequent,
have resources. One penny was Abe's hoard. With that, and an accidental
match, he began the game.
It went on well enough, albeit slightly lopsided by reason of the penny
being so much the weightier, until the match, in one unlucky throw, fell
close to a chair by the bed, and, in falling, caught fire.
Something hung down from the chair, and while Abe gazed, open-mouthed, at
the match, at the chair, and at the bed right alongside, with his sleeping
brothers on it, the little blaze caught it. The flame climbed up, up, up,
and a great smoke curled under the ceiling. The children still slept,
locked in each other's arms, and Abe--Abe ran.
He ran, frightened half out of his senses, out of the room, out of the
house, into the street, to the nearest friendly place he knew, a
grocery-store five doors away, where his mother traded; but she was not
there. Abe merely saw that she was not there, then he hid himself
trembling.
In all the block, where three thousand tenants live, no one knew what
cruel thing was happening on the stoop of No. 19.
A train passed on the elevated road, slowing up for the station near by.
The engineer saw one wild whirl of fire within the room, and opening the
throttle of his whistle wide, let out a screech so long and so loud that
in ten seconds the street was black with men and women rushing out to see
what dreadful thing had happened.
No need of asking. From the door of the Seelig flat, burned through,
fierce flames reached across the hall, barring the way. The tenement was
shut in.
Promptly it poured itself forth upon fire-escape ladders, front and rear,
with shrieks and wailing. In the street the crowd became a deadly crush.
Police and firemen battered their way through, ran down and over men,
women, and children, with a desperate effort.
The firemen from Hook and Ladder Six, around the corner, had heard the
shrieks, and, knowing what they portended, ran with haste. But they were
too late with their extinguishers; could not even approach the burning
flat. They could only throw up their ladders to those above. For the rest
they must needs wait until the engines came.
One tore up the street, coupled on a hose, and ran it into the house. Then
died out the fire in the flat as speedily as it had come. The burning
room was pumped full of water, and the firemen entered.
Just within the room they came upon little Jacob, still alive, but half
roasted. He had struggled from the bed nearly to the door. On the bed lay
the body of Isaac, the youngest, burned to a crisp.
They carried Jacob to the police station. As they brought him out, a
frantic woman burst through the throng and threw herself upon him. It was
the children's mother come back. When they took her to the blackened
corpse of little Ike, she went stark mad. A dozen neighbors held her down,
shrieking, while others went in search of the father.
In the street the excitement grew until it became almost uncontrollable
when the dead boy was carried out.
In the midst of it little Abe returned, pale, silent, and frightened, to
stand by his raving mother.
A LITTLE PICTURE
The fire-bells rang on the Bowery in the small hours of the morning. One
of the old dwelling-houses that remain from the day when the "Bouwerie"
was yet remembered as an avenue of beer-gardens and pleasure resorts was
burning. Down in the street stormed the firemen, coupling hose and
dragging it to the front. Up-stairs in the peak of the roof, in the broken
skylight, hung a man, old, feeble, and gasping for breath, struggling
vainly to get out. He had piled chairs upon tables, and climbed up where
he could grasp the edge, but his strength had given out when one more
effort would have freed him. He felt himself sinking back. Over him was
the sky, reddened now by the fire that raged below. Through the hole the
pent-up smoke in the building found vent and rushed in a black and
stifling cloud.
"Air, air!" gasped the old man. "O God, water!"
There was a swishing sound, a splash, and the copious spray of a stream
sent over the house from the street fell upon his upturned face. It beat
back the smoke. Strength and hope returned. He took another grip on the
rafter just as he would have let go.
"Oh, that I might be reached yet and saved from this awful death!" he
prayed. "Help, O God, help!"
An answering cry came over the adjoining roof. He had been heard, and the
firemen, who did not dream that any one was in the burning building, had
him in a minute. He had been asleep in the store when the fire aroused him
and drove him, blinded and bewildered, to the attic, where he was trapped.
Safe in the street, the old man fell upon his knees.
"I prayed for water, and it came; I prayed for freedom, and was saved. The
God of my fathers be praised!" he said, and bowed his head in
thanksgiving.
A DREAM OF THE WOODS
Something came over Police Headquarters in the middle of the summer night.
It was like the sighing of the north wind in the branches of the tall firs
and in the reeds along lonely river-banks where the otter dips from the
brink for its prey. The doorman, who yawned in the hall, and to whom
reed-grown river-banks have been strangers so long that he has forgotten
they ever were, shivered and thought of pneumonia.
The sergeant behind the desk shouted for some one to close the door; it
was getting as cold as January. The little messenger boy on the lowest
step of the oaken stairs nodded and dreamed in his sleep of Uncas and
Chingachgook and the great woods. The cunning old beaver was there in his
hut, and he heard the crack of Deerslayer's rifle.
He knew all the time he was dreaming, sitting on the steps of Police
Headquarters, and yet it was all as real to him as if he were there, with
the Mingoes creeping up to him in ambush all about and reaching for his
scalp.
While he slept, a light step had passed, and the moccasin of the woods
left its trail in his dream. In with the gust through the Mulberry-street
door had come a strange pair, an old woman and a bright-eyed child, led by
a policeman, and had passed up to Matron Travers's quarters on the top
floor.
Strangely different, they were yet alike, both children of the woods. The
woman was a squaw typical in looks and bearing, with the straight black
hair, dark skin, and stolid look of her race. She climbed the steps
wearily, holding the child by the hand. The little one skipped eagerly,
two steps at a time. There was the faintest tinge of brown in her plump
cheeks, and a roguish smile in the corner of her eyes that made it a
hardship not to take her up in one's lap and hug her at sight. In her
frock of red-and-white calico she was a fresh and charming picture, with
all the grace of movement and the sweet shyness of a young fawn.
The policeman had found them sitting on a big trunk in the Grand Central
Station, waiting patiently for something or somebody that didn't come.
When he had let them sit until he thought the child ought to be in bed, he
took them into the police station in the depot, and there an effort was
made to find out who and what they were. It was not an easy matter.
Neither could speak English. They knew a few words of French, however, and
between that and a note the old woman had in her pocket the general
outline of the trouble was gathered. They were of the Canaghwaga tribe of
Iroquois, domiciled in the St. Regis reservation across the Canadian
border, and had come down to sell a trunkful of beads, and things worked
with beads. Some one was to meet them, but had failed to come, and these
two, to whom the trackless wilderness was as an open book, were lost in
the city of ten thousand homes.
The matron made them understand by signs that two of the nine white beds
in the nursery were for them, and they turned right in, humbly and
silently thankful. The little girl had carried up with her, hugged very
close under her arm, a doll that was a real ethnological study. It was a
faithful rendering of the Indian papoose, whittled out of a chunk of
wood, with two staring glass beads for eyes, and strapped to a board the
way Indian babies are, under a coverlet of very gaudy blue. It was a
marvelous doll baby, and its nurse was mighty proud of it. She didn't let
it go when she went to bed. It slept with her, and got up to play with her
as soon as the first ray of daylight peeped in over the tall roofs.
The morning brought visitors, who admired the doll, chirruped to the
little girl, and tried to talk with her grandmother, for that they made
her out to be. To most questions she simply answered by shaking her head
and holding out her credentials. There were two letters: one to the
conductor of the train from Montreal, asking him to see that they got
through all right; the other, a memorandum, for her own benefit
apparently, recounting the number of hearts, crosses, and other treasures
she had in her trunk. It was from those she had left behind at the
reservation.
"Little Angus," it ran, "sends what is over to sell for him. Sarah sends
the hearts. As soon as you can, will you try and sell some hearts?" Then
there was "love to mother," and lastly an account of what the mason had
said about the chimney of the cabin. They had sent for him to fix it. It
was very dangerous the way it was, ran the message, and if mother would
get the bricks, he would fix it right away.
The old squaw looked on with an anxious expression while the note was
being read, as if she expected some sense to come out of it that would
find her folks; but none of that kind could be made out of it, so they sat
and waited until General Parker should come in.
General Ely S. Parker was the "big Indian" of Mulberry street in a very
real sense. Though he was a clerk in the Police Department and never went
on the war-path any more, he was the head of the ancient Indian
Confederacy, chief of the Six Nations, once so powerful for mischief, and
now a mere name that frightens no one. Donegahawa--one cannot help wishing
that the picturesque old chief had kept his name of the council lodge--was
not born to sit writing at an office desk. In youth he tracked the bear
and the panther in the Northern woods. The scattered remnants of the
tribes East and West owned his rightful authority as chief. The
Canaghwagas were one of these. So these lost ones had come straight to the
official and actual head of their people when they were stranded in the
great city. They knew it when they heard the magic name of Donegahawa,
and sat silently waiting and wondering till he should come. The child
looked up admiringly at the gold-laced cap of Inspector Williams, when he
took her on his knee, and the stern face of the big policeman relaxed and
grew tender as a woman's as he took her face between his hands and kissed
it.
When the general came in, he spoke to them at once in their own tongue,
and very sweet and musical it was. Then their troubles were soon over. The
sachem, when he had heard their woes, said two words between puffs of his
pipe that cleared all the shadows away. They sounded to the paleface ear
like "Huh Hoo--ochsjawai," or something equally barbarous, but they meant
that there were not so many Indians in town but that theirs could be
found, and in that the sachem was right. The number of redskins in
Thompson street--they all live over there--is about seven.
The old squaw, when she was told that her friend would be found, got up
promptly, and, bowing first to Inspector Williams and the other officials
in the room, and next to the general, said very sweetly, "Njeawa," and
Lightfoot--that was the child's name, it appeared--said it after her;
which meant, the general explained, that they were very much obliged. Then
they went out in charge of a policeman, to begin their search, little
Lightfoot hugging her doll and looking back over her shoulder at the many
gold-laced policemen who had captured her little heart. And they kissed
their hands after her.
Mulberry street awoke from its dream of youth, of the fields and the deep
woods, to the knowledge that it was a bad day. The old doorman, who had
stood at the gate patiently answering questions for twenty years, told the
first man who came looking for a lost child, with sudden resentment, that
he ought to be locked up for losing her, and, pushing him out in the rain,
slammed the door after him.
A HEATHEN BABY
A stack of mail comes to Police Headquarters every morning from the
precincts by special department carrier. It includes the reports for the
last twenty-four hours of stolen and recovered goods, complaints, and the
thousand and one things the official mail-bag contains from day to day. It
is all routine, and everything has its own pigeonhole into which it drops
and is forgotten until some raking up in the department turns up the old
blotters and the old things once more. But at last the mail-bag contained
something that was altogether out of the usual run, to wit, a Chinese
baby.
Piccaninnies have come in it before this, lots of them, black and shiny,
and one papoose from a West-Side wigwam; but a Chinese baby never.
Sergeant Jack was so astonished that it took his breath away. When he
recovered he spoke learnedly about its clothes as evidence of its heathen
origin. Never saw such a thing before, he said. They were like they were
sewn on; it was impossible to disentangle that child by any way short of
rolling it on the floor.
Sergeant Jack is an old bachelor, and that is all he knows about babies.
The child was not sewn up at all. It was just swaddled, and no Chinese had
done that, but the Italian woman who found it. Sergeant Jack sees such
babies every night in Mulberry street, but that is the way with old
bachelors. They don't know much, anyhow.
It was clear that the baby thought so. She was a little girl, very little,
only one night old; and she regarded him through her almond eyes with a
supercilious look, as who should say, "Now, if he was only a bottle,
instead of a big, useless policeman, why, one might put up with him";
which reflection opened the flood-gates of grief and set the little Chinee
squalling: "Yow! Yow! Yap!" until the sergeant held his ears, and a
policeman carried it up-stairs in a hurry.
Down-stairs first, in the sergeant's big blotter, and up-stairs in the
matron's nursery next, the baby's brief official history was recorded.
There was very little of it, indeed, and what there was was not marked by
much ceremony. The stork hadn't brought it, as it does in far-off Denmark;
nor had the doctor found it and brought it in, on the American plan.
An Italian woman had just scratched it out of an ash-barrel. Perhaps
that's the way they find babies in China, in which case the sympathy of
all American mothers and fathers will be with the present despoilers of
the heathen Chinee, who is entitled to no consideration whatever until he
introduces a new way.
The Italian woman was Mrs. Maria Lepanto. She lives in Thompson street,
but she had come all the way down to the corner of Elizabeth and Canal
streets with her little girl to look at a procession passing by. That as
everybody knows, is next door to Chinatown. It was ten o'clock, and the
end of the procession was in sight, when she noticed something stirring in
an ash-barrel that stood against the wall. She thought first it was a rat,
and was going to run, when a noise that was certainly not a rat's squeal
came from the barrel. The child clung to her hand and dragged her toward
the sound.
"Oh, mama!" she cried, in wild excitement, "hear it! It isn't a rat! I
know! Hear!"
It was a wail, a very tiny wail, ever so sorry, as well it might be,
coming from a baby that was cradled in an ash-barrel. It was little
Susie's eager hands that snatched it out. Then they saw that it was indeed
a child, a poor, helpless, grieving little baby.
It had nothing on at all, not even a rag. Perhaps they had not had time to
dress it.
"Oh, it will fit my dolly's jacket!" cried Susie, dancing around and
hugging it in glee. "It will, mama! A real live baby! Now Tilde needn't
brag of theirs. We will take it home, won't we, mama!"
The bands brayed, and the flickering light of many torches filled the
night. The procession had gone down the street, and the crowd with it. The
poor woman wrapped the baby in her worn shawl and gave it to the girl to
carry. And Susie carried it, prouder and happier than any of the men that
marched to the music. So they arrived home. The little stranger had found
friends and a resting-place.
But not for long. In the morning Mrs. Lepanto took counsel with the
neighbors, and was told that the child must be given to the police. That
was the law, they said, and though little Susie cried bitterly at having
to part with her splendid new toy, Mrs. Lepanto, being a law-abiding
woman, wrapped up her find and took it to the Macdougal-street station.
That was the way it got to Headquarters with the morning mail, and how
Sergeant Jack got a chance to tell all he didn't know about babies. Matron
Travers knew more, a good deal. She tucked the little heathen away in a
trundle-bed with a big bottle, and blessed silence fell at once on
Headquarters. In five minutes the child was asleep.
While it slept, Matron Travers entered it in her book as "No. 103" of that
year's crop of the gutter, and before it woke up she was on the way with
it, snuggled safely in a big gray shawl, up to the Charities. There Mr.
Bauer registered it under yet another number, chucked it under the chin,
and chirped at it in what he probably thought might pass for baby Chinese.
Then it got another big bottle and went to sleep once more.
At ten o'clock there came a big ship on purpose to give the little
Mott-street waif a ride up the river, and by dinner-time it was on a
green island with four hundred other babies of all kinds and shades, but
not one just like it in the whole lot. For it was New York's first and
only Chinese foundling. As to that Superintendent Bauer, Matron Travers,
and Mrs. Lepanto agreed. Sergeant Jack's evidence doesn't count, except as
backed by his superiors. He doesn't know a heathen baby when he sees one.
The island where the waif from Mott street cast anchor is called Randall's
Island, and there its stay ends, or begins. The chances are that it ends,
for with an ash-barrel filling its past and a foundling asylum its future,
a baby hasn't much of a show. Babies were made to be hugged each by one
pair of mother's arms, and neither white-capped nurses nor sleek
milch-cows fed on the fattest of meadow-grass can take their place, try as
they may. The babies know that they are cheated, and they will not stay.
HE KEPT HIS TRYST
Policeman Schultz was stamping up and down his beat in Hester street,
trying to keep warm, on the night before Christmas, when a human wreck, in
rum and rags, shuffled across his path and hailed him: "You allus treated
me fair, Schultz," it said; "say, will you do a thing for me?"
"What is it, Denny?" said the officer. He had recognized the wreck as
Denny the Robber, a tramp who had haunted his beat ever since he had been
on it, and for years before, he had heard, further back than any one knew.
"Will you," said the wreck, wistfully--"will you run me in and give me
about three months to-morrow? Will you do it?"