while stoutly maintaining that it was a keg. He scratched his head and
concluded that it might have come over the roof, or, somehow, from a
building that is in course of erection next door. The chowder had come
in by the main door. At least one policeman had seen it carried
upstairs. He had fallen in behind it immediately.
When the Commissioner had heard this story told exactly twenty times
the platoon fell in and marched off to the elevated station. When he
can decide what punishment to inflict on a policeman who does not know
a beer-keg when he sees it, they all will be fined accordingly, and a
doorman who has served a term as a barkeeper will be sent to the East
One Hundred and Fourth Street station to keep the police there out of
harm's way.
DIFFICULTIES OF A DEACON
It is my firm opinion that newspaper men should not be deacons. Not
that there is any moral or spiritual reason why they should
abstain--not that; but it doesn't work; the chances are all against
it. I know it from experience. I was a deacon myself once.
It was at a time when they were destroying gambling tools at Police
Headquarters. I was there, and I carried away as a memento of the
occasion a pocketful of red, white, yellow, and blue chips. They were
pretty, and I thought they would be nice to have around. That was the
beginning of the mischief. I was a very energetic deacon, and attended
to the duties of the office with zeal. It was a young church; I had
helped to found it myself; and at the Thursday night meetings I was
rarely missing. The very next week it was my turn to lead it, and I
started in to interpret the text to the best of my ability, and with
much approval from the brethren.
I have a nervous habit, when talking, of fingering my watch, keys,
knife, or whatever I happen to fish out of my pocket first. It
happened to be the poker chips this time. Now, I have never played
poker. I don't know the game from the smallpox. But it seems that the
congregation did. I could not at first account for the enthusiasm of
the brethren as I laid down the law, and checked off the points
successively on a white, a red, and a yellow chip, summing the
argument up on a blue. I was rather flattered by my success at
presenting the matter in a convincing light; and when the dominie
leaned over and examined the chips attentively, I gave him a handful
for the baby, cheerfully telling him that I had plenty more at home.
The look of horror on the good man's face remained a puzzle to me
until some of the congregation asked me on the train in the morning,
in a confidential kind of way, where the game was, and how high was
the ante. The explanation that ensued was not a success. I think that
it shook the confidence of the brethren in me for the first time.
It occurs to me now, looking back, that the fact that I had a black
eye on that occasion may have contributed in a measure to this result.
Yet it was as innocent an eye as those chips; in fact, it was
distinctly an ecclesiastical black eye, if I may so call it. I was
never a fighter, any more than I was a gambler. Only once in my life
was I accused of fighting, and then most unjustly. It was when a man
who had come into my office with a hickory club to punish me for a
wrong, as he insisted upon considering it,--while in reality it was an
act of strictest justice to him,--happened to fall out of a window,
taking the whole sash with him. The simple fact was that I didn't
strike a blow. He literally fell out. However, that is another story,
and a much older one.
This black eye was a direct outcome of my zeal as deacon. Between the
duties it imposed upon me, and my work as a newspaper man, I was
getting very much in need of exercise of some sort. The doctor
recommended Indian clubs; but the boys in the office liked boxing, and
it seemed to me to have some advantages. So we clubbed together, and
got a set of gloves, and when we were not busy would put them on and
have a friendly set-to. It was inevitable that our youthful spirits
should rise at these meetings, and with them occasionally certain
lumps, which afterward shaded off into various tints bordering more or
less on black until we learned to keep a leech on hand for
emergencies. You see, what with the spirit of the contest, the
tenderness of our untrained flesh, and certain remembered scores which
were thus paid off in an entirely friendly and Christian manner,
leaving no bad blood behind,--especially after we had engaged the
leech,--this was not only reasonable, but inevitable. But the brethren
knew nothing of this, and couldn't be persuaded to listen to it; and,
in fairness, it must be owned that the spectacle of a deacon with a
black eye and a handful of poker chips expounding the text in
prayer-meeting was--well, let us say that appearances were against me.
Still, I might have come through it all right had it not been for Mac.
Mac was the dog. It never rains but it pours; and just at this time
midnight burglars took to raiding our suburban town, and dogs came
into fashion. Mac came into it with a long jump. He had been part of
the outfit of a dog pit in a low dive on the East Side which the
police had broken up. Sergeant Jack had heard of my need, and gave him
to me for old acquaintance' sake, warranting him to keep anybody away
from the house. Upon this point there was never the least doubt. We
might just as well have lived on a desert island while we had him.
People went around the next block to avoid our house. It was not
because Mac was unsociable; quite the contrary. He took to the town
from the first, especially to the other dogs. These he generally took
by the throat, to the great distress of their owners. I have never
heard that bulldogs as a class have theories, and I am not prepared
to discuss the point. I know that Mac had. He was an evolutionist,
with a firm belief in the principle of the survival of the fittest;
and he did all one dog could do to carry it into practice. His efforts
eventually brought it down to a question between himself and a big
long-haired dog in the next street. I think of this with regret,
because it was the occasion of my one real slip. The dog led me into
temptation.
If it only had not been Sunday, and church time, when the issue became
urgent, and the long-haired one accepted our invitation for a walk in
the deep woods! In this saddening reflection I was partly comforted,
while taking the by-paths for home afterward,--with Mac limping along
on three legs, and minus one ear,--by the knowledge that our view of
the case had prevailed. The long-haired one troubled us no more
thereafter.
Mac had his strong points, but he had also his failings. One of these
was a weakness for stale beer. I suppose he had been brought up on it
in the dog pit. The pure air of Long Island, and the usual environment
of his new home, did not wean him from it. He had not been long in our
house before he took to absenting himself for days and nights at a
time, returning ragged and fagged out, as if from a long spree. We
found out, by accident, that he spent those vacations in a low saloon
a mile up the plank road, which he had probably located on one of his
excursions through the country to extend his doctrine of evolution. It
was the conductor on the horse-car that ran past the saloon who told
me of it. Mac had found the cars out, too, and rode regularly up and
down to the place, surveying the country from the rear platform. The
conductor prudently refrained from making any remarks after Mac had
once afforded him a look at his jaw. I am sorry to say that I think
Mac got drunk on those trips. I judged, from remarks I overheard once
or twice about the "deacon's drunken dog," that the community shared
my conviction. It was always quick to jump at conclusions,
particularly about deacons.
Sober second thought should have acquitted me of all the allegations
against me, except the one matter of the Sunday discussion in the
woods, which, however, I had forgotten to mention. But sober second
thought, that ought always and specially to attach itself to the
deaconry, was apparently at a premium in our town. I had begun to tire
of the constant explanations that were required, when the climax came
in a manner wholly unforeseen and unexpected. The cashier in the
office had run away, or was under suspicion, or something, and it
became necessary to overhaul the accounts to find out where the
office stood. When that was done, my chief summoned me down town for a
private interview. Upon the table lay my weekly pay-checks for three
years back, face down. My employer eyed them and me, by turns,
curiously.
"Mr. Riis," he began stiffly, "I'm not going to judge you unheard;
and, for that matter, it is none of my business. I have known you all
this time as a sober, steady man; I believe you are a deacon in your
church; and I never heard that you gambled or bet money. It seems now
that I was never more mistaken in a man in my life. Tell me, how do
you do it, anyhow? Do you blow in the whole of your salary every week
on policy, or do you run a game of your own up there? Look at those
checks."
He pointed to the lot. I stared at them in bewilderment. They were my
own checks, sure enough; and underneath my name, on the back of each
one, was the indorsement of the infamous blackleg whose name had been
a byword ever since I could remember as that of the chief devil in the
policy blackmail conspiracy that had robbed the poor and corrupted the
police force to the core.
I went home and resigned my office as deacon. I did not explain. We
were having a little difficulty at the time, about another matter,
which made it easy. I did not add this straw, though the explanation
was simple enough. My chief grasped it at once; but then, he was not a
deacon. I had simply got my check cashed every week in a cigar-store
next door that was known to be a policy-shop for the special
accommodation of Police Headquarters in those days, and the check had
gone straight into the "backer's" bank-account. That was how. But, as
I said, it was hopeless to try to explain, and I didn't. I simply
record here what I said at the beginning, that it is no use for a
newspaper man, more particularly a police reporter, to try to be a
deacon too. The chances are all against it.
FIRE IN THE BARRACKS
The rush and roar, the blaze and the wild panic of a great fire filled
Twenty-third Street. Helmeted men stormed and swore; horses tramped
and reared; crying women, hurrying hither and thither, stumbled over
squirming hose on street and sidewalk.
The throbbing of a dozen pumping-engines merged all other sounds in
its frantic appeal for haste. In the midst of it all, seven
red-shirted men knelt beside a heap of trunks, hastily thrown up as
for a breastwork, and prayed fervently with bared heads.
Firemen and policemen stumbled up against them with angry words,
stopped, stared, and passed silently by. The fleeing crowd hailed and
fell back. The rush and the roar swirled to the right and to the left,
leaving the little band as if in an eddy, untouched and serene, with
the glow of the fire upon it and the stars paling overhead.
The seven were the Swedish Salvation Army. Their barracks were burning
up in a blast of fire so sudden and so fierce that scant time was
left to save life and goods.
From the tenements next door men and women dragged bundles and
feather-beds, choking stairs and halls, and shrieking madly to be let
out. The police struggled angrily with the torrent. The lodgers in the
Holly-Tree Inn, who had nothing to save, ran for their lives.
In the station-house behind the barracks they were hastily clearing
the prison. The last man had hardly passed out of his cell when, with
a deafening crash, the toppling wall fell upon and smashed the roof of
the jail.
Fire-bells rang in every street as engines rushed from north and
south. A general alarm had called out the reserves. Every hydrant for
blocks around was tapped. Engine crews climbed upon the track of the
elevated road, picketed the surrounding tenements, and stood their
ground on top of the police station.
Up there two crews labored with a Siamese joint hose throwing a stream
as big as a man's thigh. It got away from them, and for a while there
was panic and a struggle up on the heights as well as in the street.
The throbbing hose bounded over the roof, thrashing right and left,
and flinging about the men who endeavored to pin it down like
half-drowned kittens. It struck the coping, knocked it off, and the
resistless stream washed brick and stone down into the yard as upon
the wave of a mighty flood.
Amid the fright and uproar the seven alone were calm. The sun rose
upon their little band perched upon the pile of trunks, victorious and
defiant. It shone upon Old Glory and the Salvation Army's flag
floating from their improvised fort, and upon an ample lake, sprung up
within an hour where yesterday there was a vacant sunken lot. The fire
was out, the firemen going home.
The lodgers in the Holly-Tree Inn, of whom there is one for every day
in the year, looked upon the sudden expanse of water, shivered, and
went in. The tenants returned to their homes. The fright was over,
with the darkness.
WAR ON THE GOATS
War has been declared in Hell's Kitchen. An indignant public opinion
demands to have "something done ag'in' them goats," and there is alarm
at the river end of the street. A public opinion in Hell's Kitchen
that demands anything besides schooners of mixed ale is a sign. Surer
than a college settlement and a sociological canvass, it foretells the
end of the slum. Sebastopol, the rocky fastness of the gang that gave
the place its bad name, was razed only the other day, and now the
police have been set on the goats. Cause enough for alarm.
A reconnaissance in force by the enemy showed some foundation for the
claim that the goats owned the block. Thirteen were found foraging in
the gutters, standing upon trucks, or calmly dozing in doorways. They
evinced no particularly hostile disposition, but a marked desire to
know the business of every chance caller in the block. This caused a
passing unpleasantness between one big white goat and the janitress of
the tenement on the corner. Being crowded up against the wall by the
animal, bent on exploring her pockets, she beat it off with her
scrubbing-pail and mop. The goat, thus dismissed, joined a horse at
the curb in apparently innocent meditation, but with one leering eye
fixed back over its shoulder upon the housekeeper setting out an ash
barrel.
Her back was barely turned when it was in the barrel, with head and
fore feet exploring its depths. The door of the tenement opened upon
the housekeeper trundling another barrel just as the first one fell
and rolled across the sidewalk, with the goat capering about. Then was
the air filled with bad language and a broomstick and a goat for a
moment, and the woman was left shouting her wrongs.
"What de divil good is dem goats anyhow?" she said, panting. "There's
no housekeeper in de United Shtates can watch de ash cans wid dem
divil's imps around. They near killed an Eyetalian child the other
day, and two of them got basted in de neck when de goats follied dem
and didn't get nothing. That big white one o' Tim's, he's the worst in
de lot, and he's got only one horn, too."
This wicked and unsymmetrical animal is denounced for its malice
throughout the block by even the defenders of the goats. Singularly
enough, he cannot be located, and neither can Tim. If the scouting
party has better luck and can seize this wretched beast, half the
campaign may be over. It will be accepted as a sacrifice by one side,
and the other is willing to give it up.
Mrs. Shallock lives in a crazy old frame-house, over a saloon. Her
kitchen is approached by a sort of hen-ladder, a foot wide, which
terminates in a balcony, the whole of which was occupied by a big gray
goat. There was not room for the police inquisitor and the goat too,
and the former had to wait till the animal had come off his perch.
Mrs. Shallock is a widow. A load of anxiety and concern overspread her
motherly countenance when she heard of the trouble.
"Are they after dem goats again?" she said. "Sarah! Leho! come right
here, an' don't you go in the street again. Excuse me, sor! but it's
all because one of dem knocked down an old woman that used to give it
a paper every day. She is the mother of the blind newsboy around on
the avenue, an' she used to feed an old paper to him every night. So
he follied her. That night she didn't have any, an' when he stuck his
nose in her basket an' didn't find any, he knocked her down, an' she
bruk her arrum."
Whether it was the one-horned goat that thus insisted upon his
sporting extra does not appear. Probably it was.
"There's neighbors lives there has got 'em on floors," Mrs. Shallock
kept on. "I'm paying taxes here, an' I think it's my privilege to have
one little goat."
"I just wish they'd take 'em," broke in the widow's buxom daughter,
who had appeared in the doorway, combing her hair. "They goes up in
the hall and knocks on the door with their horns all night. There's
sixteen dozen of them on the stoop, if there's one. What good are
they? Let's sell 'em to the butcher, mamma; he'll buy 'em for mutton,
the way he did Bill Buckley's. You know right well he did."
"They ain't much good, that's a fact," mused the widow. "But yere's
Leho; she's follying me around just like a child. She is a regular
pet, is Leho. We got her from Mr. Lee, who is dead, and we called her
after him, Leho [Leo]. Take Sarah; but Leho, little Leho, let's keep."
Leho stuck her head in through the front door and belied her name. If
the widow keeps her, another campaign will shortly have to be begun in
Forty-sixth Street. There will be more goats where Leho is.
Mr. Cleary lives in a rear tenement and has only one goat. It belongs,
he says, to his little boy, and is no good except to amuse him. Minnie
is her name, and she once had a mate. When it was sold, the boy cried
so much that he was sick for two weeks. Mr. Cleary couldn't think of
parting with Minnie.
Neither will Mr. Lennon, in the next yard, give up his. He owns the
stable, he says, and axes no odds of anybody. His goat is some good
anyhow, for it gives milk for his tea. Says his wife, "Many is the
dime it has saved us." There are two goats in Mr. Lennon's yard, one
perched on top of a shed surveying the yard, the other engaged in
chewing at a buck-saw that hangs on the fence.
Mrs. Buckley does not know how many goats she has. A glance at the
bigger of the two that are stabled at the entrance to the tenement
explains her doubts, which are temporary. Mrs. Buckley says that her
husband "generally sells them away," meaning the kids, presumably to
the butcher for mutton.
"Hey, Jenny!" she says, stroking the big one at the door. Jenny eyes
the visitor calmly, and chews an old newspaper. She has two horns.
"She ain't as bad as they lets on," says Mrs. Buckley.
The scouting party reports the new public opinion of the Kitchen to be
of healthy but alien growth, as yet without roots in the soil strong
enough to stand the shock of a general raid on the goats. They
recommend as a present concession the seizure of the one-horned Billy
that seems to have no friends on the block, if indeed he belongs
there, and an ambush is being laid accordingly.
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?"
"That I will," said Schultz. He had often done it before, sometimes
for three, sometimes for six months, and sometimes for ten days,
according to how he and Denny and the justice felt about it. In the
spell between trips to the island, Denny was a regular pensioner of
the policeman, who let him have a quarter or so when he had so little
money as to be next to desperate. He never did get quite to that
point. Perhaps the policeman's quarters saved him. His nickname of
"the Robber" was given to him on the same principle that dubbed the
neighborhood he haunted the Pig Market--because pigs are the only ware
not for sale there. Denny never robbed anybody. The only thing he ever
stole was the time he should have spent in working. There was no
denying it, Denny was a loafer. He himself had told Schultz that it
was because his wife and children put him out of their house in
Madison Street five years before. Perhaps if his wife's story had been
heard it would have reversed that statement of facts. But nobody ever
heard it. Nobody took the trouble to inquire. The O'Neil family--that
was understood to be the name--interested no one in Jewtown. One of
its members was enough. Except that Mrs. O'Neil lived in Madison
Street, somewhere "near Lundy's store," nothing was known of her.
"That I will, Denny," repeated the policeman, heartily, slipping him a
dime for luck. "You come around to-morrow, and I will run you in. Now
go along."
But Denny didn't go, though he had the price of two "balls" at the
distillery. He shifted thoughtfully on his feet, and said:--
"Say, Schultz, if I should die now,--I am all full o' rheumatiz, and
sore,--if I should die before, would you see to me and tell the
wife?"
"Small fear of yer dying, Denny, with the price of two drinks," said
the policeman, poking him facetiously in the ribs with his club.
"Don't you worry. All the same, if you will tell me where the old
woman lives, I will let her know. What's the number?"
But the Robber's mood had changed under the touch of the silver dime
that burned his palm. "Never mind, Schultz," he said; "I guess I won't
kick; so long!" and moved off.
The snow drifted wickedly down Suffolk Street Christmas morning,
pinching noses and ears and cheeks already pinched by hunger and want.
It set around the corner into the Pig Market, where the hucksters
plodded knee-deep in the drifts, burying the horse-radish man and his
machine and coating the bare, plucked breasts of the geese that swung
from countless hooks at the corner stand with softer and whiter down
than ever grew there. It drove the suspender-man into the hallway of a
Suffolk Street tenement, where he tried to pluck the icicles from his
frozen ears and beard with numb and powerless fingers.
As he stepped out of the way of some one entering with a blast that
set like a cold shiver up through the house, he stumbled over
something, and put down his hand to feel what it was. It touched a
cold face, and the house rang with a shriek that silenced the clink of
glasses in the distillery, against the side door of which the
something lay. They crowded out, glasses in hand, to see what it was.
"Only a dead tramp," said some one, and the crowd went back to the
warm saloon, where the barrels lay in rows on the racks. The clink of
glasses and shouts of laughter came through the peep-hole in the door
into the dark hallway as Policeman Schultz bent over the stiff, cold
shape. Some one had called him.
"Denny," he said, tugging at his sleeve.
"Denny, come. Your time is up. I am here." Denny never stirred. The
policeman looked up, white in the face.
"My God!" he said, "he's dead. But he kept his date."
And so he had. Denny the Robber was dead. Rum and exposure and the
"rheumatiz" had killed him. Policeman Schultz kept his word, too, and
had him taken to the station on a stretcher.
"He was a bad penny," said the saloon-keeper, and no one in Jewtown
was found to contradict him.
ROVER'S LAST FIGHT