spring was past and gone. It was a good week into June before the last
logs had gone over the canal rapids. The gang was preparing to follow,
to pitch camp on the spot where we were then sitting. Whether because
they didn't know the danger of it, or from a reckless determination to
take chances, the foreman with five of his men started to shoot the
rapids in the cook's punt. McDonald and Morden were of the venturesome
crew. They had not gone halfway before the punt was upset, and all six
were thrown out into the boiling waters. Five of them clung to the
slippery rocks and held on literally for life. Morden alone could not
swim. He went under, rose once, and floated head down past McDonald,
who was struggling to save himself. He put out a hand to grasp him,
but only tore the shirt from his back. The doomed man was whirled down
to sure death.
Just beyond were the most dangerous rocks with a tortuous fall, in
which the strongest swimmer might hardly hope to live. Nothing was
said; no words were wasted. Looking around from his own perilous
perch, the foreman saw Mike let go his hold and make after his
bunkie, swimming free with powerful strokes. The next moment the fall
swallowed both up. They were seen no more.
Three days they camped in the clearing, searching for their dead. On
the fourth, just as dynamite was coming from the settlement to stir up
the river bottom with, they recovered the body of McDonald in Trout
Lake, some miles below. A team was sent to the nearest storehouse for
planks to make a coffin of. As they were hammering it together, the
body of his lost bunkie rose in the eddy just below the rapids, in
sight of the camp. So they made two boxes and buried them on the hill,
side by side. In death, as in life, they bunked together. Their
shoepacks they left at the foot of their graves, as I had found them,
and the pipe they smoked in common, to show that they were chums.
There was no priest and no time to fetch one. The rough woodsmen stood
around in silence, with the sunset glinting through the dark pines on
their bared heads. A swamp-robin in the brush made the responses. The
older men threw a handful of sand into each open grave. The one Roman
Catholic among them crossed himself devoutly: "God rest their souls."
"Amen!" from a score of deep voices, and the service was over. The men
went back to their perilous work, harder by so much to all of them
because two were gone.
The shadows were deepening in the woods; the roar of the rapids came
up from the river like a distant chant of requiem as Aleck finished
his story. Except that the drivers sent Morden's wife his month's pay
and raised sixty dollars among themselves to put with it, there was
nothing more to tell. The two silent mounds under the pines told all
the rest.
"Come," I said, "give me your knife;" and I cut in the cross on
McDonald's grave the letters I. H. S.
"What do they stand for?" asked Aleck, looking on. I told him, and
wrote under the name, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends."
Aleck nodded. "Ay!" he said, "that's him."
JACK'S SERMON
Jack sat on the front porch in a very bad humor indeed. That was in
itself something unusual enough to portend trouble; for ordinarily
Jack was a philosopher well persuaded that, upon the whole, this was a
very good world and Deacon Pratt's porch the centre of it on
week-days. On Sundays it was transferred to the village church, and on
these days Jack received there with the family. If the truth were
told, it would probably have been found that Jack conceived the
services to be some sort of function specially designed to do him
honor at proper intervals, for he always received an extra petting on
these occasions. He sat in the pew beside the deacon through the
sermon as decorously as befitted a dog come to years of discretion
long since, and wagged his tail in a friendly manner when the minister
came down and patted him on the head after the benediction. Outside he
met the Sunday-school children on their own ground, and on their own
terms. Jack, if he didn't have blood, had sense, which for working
purposes is quite as good, if not so common. The girls gave him candy
and called him Jack Sprat. His joyous bark could be heard long after
church as he romped with the boys by the creek on the way home. It was
even suspected that on certain Sabbaths they had enjoyed a furtive
cross-country run together; but by tacit consent the village
overlooked it and put it down to the dog. Jack was privileged and not
to blame. There was certainly something, from the children's point of
view, also, in favor of Jack's conception of Sunday.
On week-day nights there were the church meetings of one kind and
another, for which Deacon Pratt's house was always the place, not
counting the sociables which Jack attended with unfailing regularity.
They would not, any of them, have been quite regular without Jack.
Indeed, many a question of grave church polity had been settled only
after it had been submitted to and passed upon in meeting by Jack. "Is
not that so, Jack?" was a favorite clincher to arguments which, it was
felt, had won over his master. And Jack's groping paw cemented a
treaty of good-will and mutual concession that had helped the village
church over more than one hard place. For there were hard heads and
stubborn wills in it as there are in other churches; and Deacon
Pratt, for all he was a just man, was set on having his way.
And now all this was changed. What had come over the town Jack
couldn't make out, but that it was something serious nobody was needed
to tell him. Folks he used to meet at the gate, going to the trains of
mornings, on neighborly terms, hurried past him without as much as a
look. And Deacon Jones, who gave him ginger-snaps out of the
pantry-crock as a special bribe for a hand-shake, had even put out his
foot to kick him, actually kick him, when he waylaid him at the corner
that morning. The whole week there had not been as much as a visitor
at the house, and what with Christmas in town--Jack knew the signs
well enough; they meant raisins and goodies that came only when they
burned candles on trees in the church--it was enough to make any dog
cross. To top it all, his mistress must come down sick, worried into
it all, as like as not, he had heard the doctor say. If Jack's
thoughts could have been put into words as he sat on the porch looking
moodily over the road, they would doubtless have taken something like
this shape, that it was a pity that men didn't have the sense of dogs,
but would bear grudges and make themselves and their betters unhappy.
And in the village there would have been more than one to agree with
him secretly.
Jack wouldn't have been any the wiser had he been told that the
trouble that had come to town was that of all things most worrisome, a
church quarrel. What was it about and how did it come? I doubt if any
of the men and women who strove in meeting for principle and
conscience with might and main, and said mean things about each other
out of meeting, could have explained it. I know they all would have
explained it differently, and so added fuel to the fire that was hot
enough already. In fact, that was what had happened the night before
Jack encountered his special friend, Deacon Jones, and it was in
virtue of his master's share in it that he had bestowed the memorable
kick upon him. Deacon Pratt was the valiant leader of the opposing
faction.
To the general stress of mind the holiday had but added another cause
of irritation. Could Jack have understood the ethics of men he would
have known that it strangely happens that:
"Forgiveness to the injured does belong,
But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong,"
and that everybody in a church quarrel having injured everybody else
within reach for conscience's sake, the season of good-will and even
the illness of that good woman, the wife of Deacon Pratt, admittedly
from worry over the trouble, practically put a settlement of it out
of the question. But being only a dog he did not understand. He could
only sulk; and as this went well enough with things as they were in
general, it proved that Jack was, as was well known, a very
intelligent dog.
He had yet to give another proof of it, that very day, by preaching to
the divided congregation its Christmas sermon, a sermon that is to
this day remembered in Brownville; but of that neither they nor he,
sitting there on the stoop nursing his grievances, had at that time
any warning.
It was Christmas Eve. Since the early Lutherans settled there, away
back in the last century, it had been the custom in the village to
celebrate the Holy Eve with a special service and a Christmas tree;
and preparations had been going forward for it all the afternoon. It
was noticeable that the fighting in the congregation in no wise
interfered with the observance of the established forms of worship;
rather, it seemed to lend a keener edge to them. It was only the
spirit that suffered. Jack, surveying the road from the porch, saw
baskets and covered trays carried by, and knew their contents. He had
watched the big Christmas tree going down on the grocer's sled, and
his experience plus his nose supplied the rest. As the lights came out
one by one after twilight, he stirred uneasily at the unwonted
stillness in his house. Apparently no one was getting ready for
church. Could it be that they were not going; that this thing was to
be carried to the last ditch? He decided to go and investigate.
His investigations were brief, but entirely conclusive. For the second
time that day he was spurned, and by a friend. This time it was the
deacon himself who drove him from his wife's room, whither he had
betaken him with true instinct to ascertain the household intentions.
The deacon seemed to be, if anything, in a worse humor than even Jack
himself. The doctor had told him that afternoon that Mrs. Pratt was a
very sick woman, and that, if she was to pull through at all, she must
be kept from all worriment in an atmosphere which fairly bristled with
it. The deacon felt that he had a contract on his hands which might
prove too heavy for him. He felt, too, with bitterness, that he was an
ill-used man, that all his years of faithful labor, in the vineyard
went for nothing because of some wretched heresy which the enemy had
devised to wreck it; and all his humbled pride and his pent-up wrath
gathered itself into the kick with which he sent poor Jack flying back
where he had come from. It was clear that the deacon was not going to
church.
Lonely and forsaken, Jack took his old seat on the porch and pondered.
The wrinkles in his brow multiplied and grew deeper as he looked down
the road and saw the Joneses, the Smiths, and the Allens go by toward
the church. When the Merritts had passed, too, under the lamp, he knew
that it must be nearly time for the sermon. They always came in after
the long prayer. Jack took a turn up and down the porch, whined at the
door once, and, receiving no answer, set off down the road by himself.
The church was filled. It had never looked handsomer. The rival
factions had vied with each other in decorating it. Spruce and hemlock
sprouted everywhere, and garlands of ground-ivy festooned walls and
chancel. The delicious odor of balsam and of burning wax-candles was
in the air. The people were all there in their Sunday clothes and the
old minister in the pulpit; but the Sunday feeling was not there.
Something was not right. Deacon Pratt's pew alone of them all was
empty, and the congregation cast wistful glances at it, some secretly
behind their hymn-books, others openly and sorrowfully. What the
doctor had said in the afternoon had got out. He himself had told Mrs.
Mills that it was doubtful if the deacon's wife got around, and it sat
heavily upon the conscience of the people.
The opening hymns were sung; the Merritts, late as usual, had taken
their seats. The minister took up the Book to read the Christmas
gospel from the second chapter of Luke. He had been there longer than
most of those who were in the church to-night could remember, had
grown old with the people, had loved them as the shepherd who is
answerable to the Master for his flock. Their griefs and their
troubles were his. If he could not ward them off, he could suffer with
them. His voice trembled a little as he read of the tidings of great
joy. Perhaps it was age; but it grew firmer as he proceeded toward the
end:--
"And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly
host praising God and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on
earth peace, good-will toward men.'"
The old minister closed the Book and looked out over the congregation.
He looked long and yearningly, and twice he cleared his throat, only
to repeat, "on earth peace, good-will toward men." The people settled
back in their seats, uneasily; they strangely avoided the eye of their
pastor. It rested in its slow survey of the flock upon Deacon Pratt's
empty pew. And at that moment a strange thing occurred.
Why it should seem strange was, perhaps, not the least strange part of
it. Jack had come in alone before. He knew the trick of the
door-latch, and had often opened it unaided. He was in the habit of
attending the church with the folks; there was no reason why they
should not expect him, unless they knew of one themselves. But somehow
the click of the latch went clear through the congregation as the
heavenly message of good-will had not. All eyes were turned upon the
deacon's pew; and they waited.
Jack came slowly and gravely up the aisle and stopped at his master's
pew. He sniffed of the empty seat disapprovingly once or twice--he had
never seen it in that state before--then he climbed up and sat,
serious and attentive as he was wont, in his old seat, facing the
pulpit, nodding once as who should say, "I'm here; proceed!"
It is recorded that not even a titter was heard from the
Sunday-school, which was out in force. In the silence that reigned in
the church was heard only a smothered sob. The old minister looked
with misty eyes at his friend. He took off his spectacles, wiped them
and put them on again, and tried to speak; but the tears ran down his
cheeks and choked his voice. The congregation wept with him.
"Brethren," he said, when he could speak, "glory to God in the
highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men! Jack has preached
a better sermon than I can to-night. Let us pray together."
It is further recorded that the first and only quarrel in the
Brownville church ended on Christmas Eve and was never heard of again,
and that it was all the work of Jack's sermon.
SKIPPY OF SCRABBLE ALLEY
Skippy was at home in Scrabble Alley. So far as he had ever known home
of any kind it was there in the dark and mouldy basement of the rear
house, farthest back in the gap that was all the builder of those big
tenements had been able to afford of light and of air for the poor
people whose hard-earned wages, brought home every Saturday, left them
as poor as if they had never earned a dollar, to pile themselves up in
his strong box. The good man had long since been gathered to his
fathers: gone to his better home. It was in the newspapers, and in the
alley it was said that it was the biggest funeral--more than a hundred
carriages, and four black horses to pull the hearse. So it must be
true, of course.
Skippy wondered vaguely, sometimes, when he thought of it, what kind
of a home it might be where people went in a hundred carriages. He had
never sat in one. The nearest he had come to it was when Jimmy
Murphy's cab had nearly run him down once, and his "fare," a big man
with whiskers, had put his head out and angrily called him a brat,
and told him to get out of the way, or he would have him arrested. And
Jimmy had shaken his whip at him and told him to skip home. Everybody
told him to skip. From the policeman on the block to the hard-fisted
man he knew as his father, and who always had a job for him with the
"growler" when he came home, they were having Skippy on the run.
Probably that was how he got his name. No one cared enough about it,
or about the boy, to find out.
Was there anybody anywhere who cared about boys, anyhow? Were there
any boys in that other home where the carriages and the big hearse had
gone? And if there were, did they have to live in an alley, and did
they ever have any fun? These were thoughts that puzzled Skippy's
young brain once in a while. Not very long or very hard, for Skippy
had not been trained to think; what training the boys picked up in the
alley didn't run much to deep thinking.
Perhaps it was just as well. There were one or two men there who were
said to know a heap, and who had thought and studied it all out about
the landlord and the alley. But it was very tiresome that it should
happen to be just those two, for Skippy never liked them. They were
always cross and ugly, never laughed and carried on as other men did
once in a while, and made his little feet very tired running with the
growler early and late. He well remembered, too, that it was one of
them who had said, when they brought him home, sore and limping, from
under the wheels of Jimmy Murphy's cab, that he'd been better off if
it had killed him. He had always borne a grudge against him for that,
for there was no occasion for it that he could see. Hadn't he been to
the gin-mill for him that very day twice?
Skippy's horizon was bounded by the towering brick walls of Scrabble
Alley. No sun ever rose or set between them. On the hot summer days,
when the saloon-keeper on the farther side of the street pulled up his
awning, the sun came over the housetops and looked down for an hour or
two into the alley. It shone upon broken flags, a mud-puddle by the
hydrant where the children went splashing with dirty, bare feet, and
upon unnumbered ash barrels. A stray cabbage leaf in one of those was
the only green thing it found, for no ray ever strayed through the
window in Skippy's basement to trace the green mould on the wall.
Once, while he had been lying sick with a fever, Skippy had struck up
a real friendly acquaintance with that mouldy wall. He had pictured to
himself woods and hills and a regular wilderness, such as he had heard
of, in its green growth; but even that pleasure they had robbed him
of. The charity doctor had said that the mould was bad, and a man
scraped it off and put whitewash on the wall. As if everything that
made fun for a boy was bad.
Down the street a little way, was a yard just big enough and nice to
play ball in, but the agent had put up a sign that he would have no
boys and no ball-playing in his yard, and that ended it; for the "cop"
would have none of it in the street either. Once he had caught them at
it and "given them the collar." They had been up before the judge; and
though he let them off, they had been branded, Skippy and the rest, as
a bad lot.
That was the starting-point in Skippy's career. With the brand upon
him he accepted the future it marked out for him, reasoning as little,
or as vaguely, about the justice of it as he had about the home
conditions of the alley. The world, what he had seen of it, had taught
him one lesson: to take things as he found them, because that was the
way they were; and that being the easiest, and, on the whole, best
suited to Skippy's general make-up, he fell naturally into the _rôle_
assigned him. After that he worked the growler on his own hook most of
the time. The "gang" he had joined found means of keeping it going
that more than justified the brand the policeman had put upon it. It
was seldom by honest work. What was the use? The world owed them a
living, and it was their business to collect it as easily as they
could. It was everybody's business to do that, as far as they could
see, from the man who owned the alley, down.
They made the alley pan out in their own way. It had advantages the
builder hadn't thought of, though he provided them. Full of secret ins
and outs, runways and passages not easily found, to the surrounding
tenements, it offered chances to get away when one or more of the gang
were "wanted" for robbing this store on the avenue, tapping that till,
or raiding the grocer's stock, that were A No. 1. When some tipsy man
had been waylaid and "stood up," it was an unequalled spot for
dividing the plunder. It happened once or twice, as time went by, that
a man was knocked on the head and robbed within the bailiwick of the
now notorious Scrabble Alley gang, or that a drowned man floated
ashore in the dock with his pockets turned inside out. On such
occasions the police made an extra raid, and more or less of the gang
were scooped in; but nothing ever came of it. Dead men tell no tales,
and they were not more silent than the Scrabbles, if, indeed, these
had anything to tell.
It came gradually to be an old story. Skippy and his associates were
long since in the Rogues' Gallery, numbered and indexed as truly a
bad lot now. They were no longer boys, but toughs. Most of them had
"done time" up the river and come back more hardened than they went,
full of new tricks always, which they were eager to show the boys, to
prove that they had not been idle while they were away. On the police
returns they figured as "speculators," a term that sounded better than
thief, and meant, as they understood it, much the same; viz. a man who
made a living out of other people's labor. It was conceded in the
slums, everywhere, that the Scrabble Alley gang was a little the
boldest that had for a long time defied the police. It had the call on
the other gangs in all the blocks around, for it had the biggest
fighters as well as the cleverest thieves of them all.
Then one holiday morning, when in a hundred churches the pæan went up,
"On earth peace, good-will toward men," all New York rang with the
story of a midnight murder committed by Skippy's gang. The
saloon-keeper whose place they were sacking to get the "stuff" for
keeping Christmas in their way had come upon them, and Skippy had shot
him down while the others ran. A universal shout for vengeance went up
from outraged Society.
It sounded the death-knell of the gang. It was scattered to the four
winds, all except Skippy, who was tried for murder and hanged. The
papers spoke of his phenomenal calmness under the gallows; said it was
defiance. The priest who had been with him in his last hours said he
was content to go to a better home. They were all wrong. Had the
pictures that chased each other across Skippy's mind as the black cap
was pulled over his face been visible to their eyes, they would have
seen Scrabble Alley with its dripping hydrant, and the puddle in which
the children splashed with dirty, bare feet; the dark basement room
with its mouldy wall; the notice in the yard, "No ball-playing allowed
here"; the policeman who stamped him as one of a bad lot, and the
sullen man who thought it had been better for him, the time he was run
over, if he had died. Skippy asked himself moodily if he was right
after all, and if boys were ever to have any show. He died with the
question unanswered.
They said that no such funeral ever went out of Scrabble Alley before.
There was a real raid on the undertaker's where Skippy lay in state
two whole days, and the wake was talked of for many a day as something
wonderful. At the funeral services it was said that without a doubt
Skippy had gone to a better home. His account was squared.
* * * * *
Skippy's story is not invented to be told here. In its main facts it
is a plain account of a well-remembered drama of the slums, on which
the curtain was rung down in the Tombs yard. There are Skippies
without number growing up in those slums to-day, vaguely wondering why
they were born into a world that does not want them; Scrabble Alleys
to be found for the asking, all over this big city where the tenements
abound, alleys in which generations of boys have lived and
died--principally died, and thus done for themselves the best they
could, according to the crusty philosopher of Skippy's set--with
nothing more inspiring than a dead blank wall within reach of their
windows all the days of their cheerless lives. Theirs is the account
to be squared--by justice, not vengeance. Skippy is but an item on the
wrong side of the ledger. The real reckoning of outraged society is
not with him, but with Scrabble Alley.
MAKING A WAY OUT OF THE SLUM
One stormy night in the winter of 1882, going across from my office to
the Police Headquarters of New York City, I nearly stumbled over an
odd couple that crouched on the steps. As the man shifted his seat to
make way for me, the light from the green lamp fell on his face, and I
knew it as one that had haunted the police office for days with a mute
appeal for help. Sometimes a woman was with him. They were Russian
Jews, poor immigrants. No one understood or heeded them. Elbowed out
of the crowd, they had taken refuge on the steps, where they sat
silently watchful of the life that moved about them, but beyond a
swift, keen scrutiny of all who came and went, having no share in it.