meadows of Long Island. The days and the years roll by uneventfully within
its quiet precincts. Nothing more exciting than the arrival of a party of
fishermen from the city, on a vain hunt for perch in the ponds that lie
hidden among its groves and feed the Brooklyn water-works, troubles the
every-day routine of the village. Two great railroad wrecks are remembered
thereabouts, but these are already ancient history. Only the oldest
inhabitants know of the earlier one. There hasn't been as much as a sudden
death in the town since, and the constable and chief of police--probably
one and the same person--haven't turned an honest or dishonest penny in
the whole course of their official existence. All of which is as it ought
to be.
But at last something occurred that ought not to have been. The village
was aroused at daybreak by the intelligence that a robbery had been
committed overnight, and a murder. The house of Gabriel Dodge, a
well-to-do farmer, had been sacked by thieves, who left in their trail the
farmer's murdered dog. Rover was a collie, large for his kind, and quite
as noisy as the rest of them. He had been left as an outside guard,
according to Farmer Dodge's awkward practice. Inside, he might have been
of use by alarming the folks when the thieves tried to get in. But they
had only to fear his bark; his bite was harmless.
The whole of Valley Stream gathered at Farmer Dodge's house to watch,
awe-struck, the mysterious movements of the police force as it went
tiptoeing about, peeping into corners, secretly examining tracks in the
mud, and squinting suspiciously at the brogans of the bystanders. When it
had all been gone through, this record of facts bearing on the case was
made:
Rover was dead.
He had apparently been smothered.
With the hand, not a rope.
There was a ladder set up against the window of the spare bedroom.
That it had not been there before was evidence that the thieves had set it
up.
The window was open, and they had gone in.
Several watches, some good clothes, sundry articles of jewelry, all worth
some six or seven hundred dollars, were missing and could not be found.
In conclusion, the constable put on record his belief that the thieves who
had smothered the dog and set up the ladder had taken the property.
The solid citizens of the village sat upon the verdict in the store,
solemnly considered it, and agreed that it was so. This point settled,
there was left only the other: Who were the thieves? The solid citizens by
a unanimous decision concluded that Inspector Byrnes was the man to tell
them.
So they came over to New York and laid the matter before him, with a
mental diagram of the village, the house, the dog, and the ladder at the
window. There was just the suspicion of a twinkle in the corner of the
inspector's eye as he listened gravely and then said:
"It was the spare bedroom, wasn't it?"
"The spare bedroom," said the committee, in one breath.
"The only one in the house?" queried the inspector, further.
"The only one," responded the echo.
"H'm!" pondered the inspector. "You keep hands on your farm, Mr. Dodge?"
Mr. Dodge did.
"Sleep in the house?"
"Yes."
"Discharged any one lately?"
The committee rose as one man, and, staring at each other with bulging
eyes, said "Jake!" all at once.
"Jakey, b' gosh!" repeated the constable to himself, kicking his own shins
softly as he tugged at his beard. "Jake, by thunder!"
Jake was a boy of eighteen, who had been employed by the farmer to do
chores. He was shiftless, and a week or two before had been sent away in
disgrace. He had gone no one knew whither.
The committee told the inspector all about Jake, gave him a minute
description of him,--of his ways, his gait, and his clothes,--and went
home feeling that they had been wondrous smart in putting so sharp a man
on the track he would never have thought of if they hadn't mentioned
Jake's name. All he had to do now was to follow it to the end, and let
them know when he had reached it. And as these good men had prophesied,
even so it came to pass.
Detectives of the inspector's staff were put on the trail. They followed
it from the Long Island pastures across the East River to the Bowery, and
there into one of the cheap lodging-houses where thieves are turned out
ready-made while you wait. There they found Jake.
They didn't hail him at once, or clap him into irons, as the constable
from Valley Stream would have done. They let him alone and watched awhile
to see what he was doing. And the thing that they found him doing was just
what they expected: he was herding with thieves. When they had thoroughly
fastened this companionship upon the lad, they arrested the band. They
were three.
They had not been locked up many hours at Headquarters before the
inspector sent for Jake. He told him he knew all about his dismissal by
Farmer Dodge, and asked him what he had done to the old man. Jake blurted
out hotly, "Nothin'," and betrayed such feeling that his questioner soon
made him admit that he was "sore on the boss." From that to telling the
whole story of the robbery was only a little way, easy to travel in such
company as Jake was in then. He told how he had come to New York, angry
enough to do anything, and had "struck" the Bowery. Struck, too, his two
friends, not the only two of that kind who loiter about that thoroughfare.
To them he told his story while waiting in the "hotel" for something to
turn up, and they showed him a way to get square with the old man for what
he had done to him. The farmer had money and property he would hate to
lose. Jake knew the lay of the land, and could steer them straight; they
would take care of the rest. "See!" said they.
Jake saw, and the sight tempted him. But in his mind's eye he saw also
Rover and heard him bark. How could he be managed?
"He will come to me if I call him," pondered Jake, while his two
companions sat watching his face, "but you may have to kill him. Poor
Rover!"
"You call the dog and leave him to me," said the oldest thief, and shut
his teeth hard. And so it was arranged.
That night the three went out on the last train, and hid in the woods down
by the gatekeeper's house at the pond, until the last light had gone out
in the village and it was fast asleep. Then they crept up by a back way to
Farmer Dodge's house. As expected, Rover came bounding out at their
approach, barking furiously. It was Jake's turn then.
"Rover," he called softly, and whistled. The dog stopped barking and came
on, wagging his tail, but still growling ominously as he got scent of the
strange men.
"Rover, poor Rover," said Jake, stroking his shaggy fur and feeling like
the guilty wretch he was; for just then the hand of Pfeiffer, the thief,
grabbed the throat of the faithful beast in a grip as of an iron vise, and
he had barked his last bark. Struggle as he might, he could not free
himself or breathe, while Jake, the treacherous Jake, held his legs. And
so he died, fighting for his master and his home.
In the morning the ladder at the open window and poor Rover dead in the
yard told of the drama of the night.
The committee of farmers came over and took Jake home, after
congratulating Inspector Byrnes on having so intelligently followed their
directions in hunting down the thieves. The inspector shook hands with
them and smiled.
WHEN THE LETTER CAME
"To-morrow it will come," Godfrey Krueger had said that night to his
landlord. "To-morrow it will surely come, and then I shall have money.
Soon I shall be rich, richer than you can think."
And the landlord of the Forsyth-street tenement, who in his heart liked
the gray-haired inventor, but who had rooms to let, grumbled something
about a to-morrow that never came.
"Oh, but it will come," said Krueger, turning on the stairs and shading
the lamp with his hand, the better to see his landlord's good-natured
face; "you know the application has been advanced. It is bound to be
granted, and to-night I shall finish my ship."
Now, as he sat alone in his room at his work, fitting, shaping, and
whittling with restless hands, he had to admit to himself that it was
time it came. Two whole days he had lived on a crust, and he was starving.
He had worked and waited thirteen hard years for the success that had more
than once been almost within his grasp, only to elude it again. It had
never seemed nearer and surer than now, and there was need of it. He had
come to the jumping-off place. All his money was gone, to the last cent,
and his application for a pension hung fire in Washington unaccountably.
It had been advanced to the last stage, and word that it had been granted
might be received any day. But the days slipped by and no word came. For
two days he had lived on faith and a crust, but they were giving out
together. If only--
Well, when it did come, what with his back pay for all those years, he
would have the means to build his ship, and hunger and want would be
forgotten. He should have enough. And the world would know that Godfrey
Krueger was not an idle crank.
"In six months I shall cross the ocean to Europe in twenty hours in my
air-ship," he had said in showing the landlord his models, "with as many
as want to go. Then I shall become a millionaire and shall make you one,
too." And the landlord had heaved a sigh at the thought of his
twenty-seven dollars, and doubtingly wished it might be so.
Weak and famished, Krueger bent to his all but finished task. Before
morning he should know that it would work as he had planned. There
remained only to fit the last parts together. The idea of building an
air-ship had come to him while he lay dying with scurvy, as they thought,
in a Confederate prison, and he had never abandoned it. He had been a
teacher and a student, and was a trained mathematician. There could be no
flaw in his calculations. He had worked them out again and again. The
energy developed by his plan was great enough to float a ship capable of
carrying almost any burden, and of directing it against the strongest head
winds. Now, upon the threshold of success, he was awaiting merely the
long-delayed pension to carry his dream into life. To-morrow would bring
it, and with it an end to all his waiting and suffering.
One after another the lights went out in the tenement. Only the one in the
inventor's room burned steadily through the night. The policeman on the
beat noticed the lighted window, and made a mental note of the fact that
some one was sick. Once during the early hours he stopped short to listen.
Upon the morning breeze was borne a muffled sound, as of a distant
explosion. But all was quiet again, and he went on, thinking that his
senses had deceived him. The dawn came in the eastern sky, and with it the
stir that attends the awakening of another day. The lamp burned steadily
yet behind the dim window-pane.
The milkmen came, and the push-cart criers. The policeman was relieved,
and another took his place. Lastly came the mail-carrier with a large
official envelop marked, "Pension Bureau, Washington." He shouted up the
stairway:
"Krueger! Letter!"
The landlord came to the door and was glad. So it had come, had it?
"Run, Emma," he said to his little daughter, "run and tell Mr. Godfrey his
letter has come."
The child skipped up the steps gleefully. She knocked at the inventor's
door, but no answer came. It was not locked, and she pushed it open. The
little lamp smoked yet on the table. The room was strewn with broken
models and torn papers that littered the floor. Something there frightened
the child. She held to the banisters and called faintly:
"Papa! Oh, papa!"
They went in together on tiptoe without knowing why, the postman with the
big official letter in his hand. The morrow had kept its promise. Of
hunger and want there was an end. On the bed, stretched at full length,
with his Grand Army hat flung beside him, lay the inventor, dead. A little
round hole in the temple, from which a few drops of blood had flowed, told
what remained of his story. In the night disillusion had come, with
failure.
THE KID
He was an every-day tough, bull-necked, square-jawed, red of face, and
with his hair cropped short in the fashion that rules at Sing Sing and is
admired of Battle Row. Any one could have told it at a glance. The bruised
and wrathful face of the policeman who brought him to Mulberry street, to
be "stood up" before the detectives in the hope that there might be
something against him to aggravate the offense of beating an officer with
his own club, bore witness to it. It told a familiar story. The prisoner's
gang had started a fight in the street, probably with a scheme of ultimate
robbery in view, and the police had come upon it unexpectedly. The rest
had got away with an assortment of promiscuous bruises. The "Kid" stood
his ground, and went down with two "cops" on top of him after a valiant
battle, in which he had performed the feat that entitled him to honorable
mention henceforth in the felonious annals of the gang. There was no
surrender in his sullen look as he stood before the desk, his hard face
disfigured further by a streak of half-dried blood, reminiscent of the
night's encounter. The fight had gone against him--that was all right.
There was a time for getting square. Till then he was man enough to take
his medicine, let them do their worst.
It was there, plain as could be, in his set jaws and dogged bearing as he
came out, numbered now and indexed in the rogues' gallery, and started for
the police court between two officers. It chanced that I was going the
same way, and joined company. Besides, I have certain theories concerning
toughs which my friend the sergeant says are rot, and I was not averse to
testing them on the Kid.
But the Kid was a bad subject. He replied to my friendly advances with a
muttered curse, or not at all, and upset all my notions in the most
reckless way. Conversation had ceased before we were half-way across to
Broadway. He "wanted no guff," and I left him to his meditations
respecting his defenseless state. At Broadway there was a jam of trucks,
and we stopped at the corner to wait for an opening.
It all happened so quickly that only a confused picture of it is in my
mind till this day. A sudden start, a leap, and a warning cry, and the Kid
had wrenched himself loose. He was free. I was dimly conscious of a rush
of blue and brass; and then I saw--the whole street saw--a child, a
toddling baby, in the middle of the railroad-track, right in front of the
coming car. It reached out its tiny hand toward the madly clanging bell
and crowed. A scream rose wild and piercing above the tumult; men
struggled with a frantic woman on the curb, and turned their heads away--
And then there stood the Kid, with the child in his arms, unhurt. I see
him now, as he set it down gently as any woman, trying, with lingering
touch, to unclasp the grip of the baby hand upon his rough finger. I see
the hard look coming back into his face as the policeman, red and out of
breath, twisted the nipper on his wrist, with a half-uncertain aside to
me: "Them toughs there ain't no depending on nohow." Sullen, defiant,
planning vengeance, I see him led away to jail. Ruffian and thief! The
police blotter said so.
But, even so, the Kid had proved that my theories about toughs were not
rot. Who knows but that, like sergeants, the blotter may be sometimes
mistaken?
LOST CHILDREN
I am not thinking now of theological dogmas or moral distinctions. I am
considering the matter from the plain every-day standpoint of the police
office. It is not my fault that the one thing that is lost more
persistently than any other in a large city is the very thing you would
imagine to be safest of all in the keeping of its owner. Nor do I pretend
to explain it. It is simply one of the contradictions of metropolitan
life. In twenty years' acquaintance with the police office, I have seen
money, diamonds, coffins, horses, and tubs of butter brought there and
passed into the keeping of the property clerk as lost or strayed. I
remember a whole front stoop, brownstone, with steps and iron railing all
complete, being put up at auction, unclaimed. But these were mere
representatives of a class which as a whole kept its place and the peace.
The children did neither. One might have been tempted to apply the old
inquiry about the pins to them but for another contradictory circumstance:
rather more of them are found than lost.
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children keeps the account of
the surplus. It has now on its books half a score Jane Does and twice as
many Richard Roes, of whom nothing more will ever be known than that they
were found, which is on the whole, perhaps, best--for them certainly. The
others, the lost, drift from the tenements and back, a host of thousands
year by year. The two I am thinking of were of these, typical of the
maelstrom.
Yette Lubinsky was three years old when she was lost from her Essex-street
home, in that neighborhood where once the police commissioners thought
seriously of having the children tagged with name and street number, to
save trotting them back and forth between police station and Headquarters.
She had gone from the tenement to the corner where her father kept a
stand, to beg a penny, and nothing more was known of her. Weeks after, a
neighbor identified one of her little frocks as the match of one worn by
a child she had seen dragged off by a rough-looking man. But though Max
Lubinsky, the peddler, and Yette's mother camped on the steps of Police
Headquarters early and late, anxiously questioning every one who went in
and out about their lost child, no other word was heard of her. By and by
it came to be an old story, and the two were looked upon as among the
fixtures of the place. Mulberry street has other such.
They were poor and friendless in a strange land, the very language of
which was jargon to them, as theirs was to us, timid in the crush, and
they were shouldered out. It was not inhumanity; at least, it was not
meant to be. It was the way of the city, with every one for himself; and
they accepted it, uncomplaining. So they kept their vigil on the stone
steps, in storm and fair weather, every night, taking turns to watch all
who passed. When it was a policeman with a little child, as it was many
times between sunset and sunrise, the one on the watch would start up the
minute they turned the corner, and run to meet them, eagerly scanning the
little face, only to return, disappointed but not cast down, to the step
upon which the other slept, head upon knees, waiting the summons to wake
and watch.
Their mute sorrow appealed to me, then doing night duty in the newspaper
office across the way, and I tried to help them in their search for the
lost Yette. They accepted my help gratefully, trustfully, but without loud
demonstration. Together we searched the police records, the hospitals, the
morgue, and the long register of the river's dead. She was not there.
Having made sure of this, we turned to the children's asylums. We had a
description of Yette sent to each and every one, with the minutest
particulars concerning her and her disappearance, but no word came back in
response. A year passed, and we were compelled at last to give over the
search. It seemed as if every means of finding out what had become of the
child had been exhausted, and all alike had failed.
During the long search, I had occasion to go more than once to the
Lubinskys' home. They lived up three flights, in one of the big barracks
that give to the lower end of Essex street the appearance of a deep black
canyon with cliff-dwellers living in tiers all the way up, their
watch-fires showing like so many dull red eyes through the night. The hall
was pitch-dark, and the whole building redolent of the slum; but in the
stuffy little room where the peddler lived there was, in spite of it all,
an atmosphere of home that set it sharply apart from the rest. One of
these visits I will always remember. I had stumbled in, unthinking, upon
their Sabbath-eve meal. The candles were lighted, and the children
gathered about the table; at its head, the father, every trace of the
timid, shrinking peddler of Mulberry street laid aside with the week's
toil, was invoking the Sabbath blessing upon his house and all it
harbored. I saw him turn, with a quiver of the lip, to a vacant seat
between him and the mother; and it was then that I noticed the baby's high
chair, empty, but kept ever waiting for the little wanderer. I understood;
and in the strength of domestic affection that burned with unquenched
faith in the dark tenement after the many months of weary failure I read
the history of this strange people that in every land and in every day has
conquered even the slum with the hope of home.
It was not to be put to shame here, either. Yette returned, after all, and
the way of it came near being stranger than all the rest. Two long years
had passed, and the memory of her and hers had long since faded out of
Mulberry street, when, in the overhauling of one of the children's homes
we thought we had canvassed thoroughly, the child turned up, as
unaccountably as she had been lost. All that I ever learned about it was
that she had been brought there, picked up by some one in the street,
probably, and, after more or less inquiry that had failed to connect with
the search at our end of the line, had been included in their flock on
some formal commitment, and had stayed there. Not knowing her name,--she
could not tell it herself, to be understood,--they had given her one of
their own choosing; and thus disguised, she might have stayed there
forever but for the fortunate chance that cast her up to the surface once
more, and gave the clue to her identity at last. Even then her father had
nearly as much trouble in proving his title to his child as he had had in
looking for her, but in the end he made it good. The frock she had worn
when she was lost proved the missing link. The mate of it was still
carefully laid away in the tenement. So Yette returned to fill the empty
chair at the Sabbath board, and the peddler's faith was justified.
* * * * *
My other chip from the maelstrom was a lad half grown. He dropped into my
office as if out of the clouds, one long and busy day, when, tired and out
of sorts, I sat wishing my papers and the world in general in Halifax. I
had not heard the knock, and when I looked up, there stood my boy, a
stout, square-shouldered lad, with heavy cowhide boots and dull, honest
eyes--eyes that looked into mine as if with a question they were about to
put, and then gave it up, gazing straight ahead, stolid, impassive. It
struck me that I had seen that face before, and I found out immediately
where. The officer of the Children's Aid Society who had brought him
explained that Frands--that was his name--had been in the society's care
five months and over. They had found him drifting in the streets, and,
knowing whither that drift set, had taken him in charge and sent him to
one of their lodging-houses, where he had been since, doing chores and
plodding about in his dull way. That was where I had met him. Now they had
decided that he should go to Florida, if he would, but first they would
like to find out something about him. They had never been able to, beyond
the fact that he was from Denmark. He had put his finger on the map in
the reading-room, one day, and shown them where he came from: that was the
extent of their information on that point. So they had sent him to me to
talk to him in his own tongue and see what I could make of him.
I addressed him in the politest Danish I was master of, and for an instant
I saw the listening, questioning look return; but it vanished almost at
once, and he answered in monosyllables, if at all. Much of what I said
passed him entirely by. He did not seem to understand. By slow stages I
got out of him that his father was a farm-laborer; that he had come over
to look for his cousin, who worked in Passaic, New Jersey, and had found
him,--Heaven knows how!--but had lost him again. Then he had drifted to
New York, where the society's officers had come upon him. He nodded when
told that he was to be sent far away to the country, much as if I had
spoken of some one he had never heard of. We had arrived at this point
when I asked him the name of his native town.
The word he spoke came upon me with all the force of a sudden blow. I had
played in the old village as a boy; all my childhood was bound up in its
memories. For many years now I had not heard its name--not since boyhood
days spoken as he spoke it. Perhaps it was because I was tired: the office
faded away, desk, Headquarters across the street, boy, officer, business,
and all. In their place were the brown heath I loved, the distant hills,
the winding wagon-track, the peat-stacks, and the solitary sheep browsing
on the barrows. Forgotten the thirty years, the seas that rolled between,
the teeming city! I was at home again, a child. And there he stood, the
boy, with it all in his dull, absent look. I read it now as plain as the
day.
"Hua er et no? Ka do ett fosto hua a sejer?"