Out of Mulberry Street — Section 6
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 if 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 halted 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.
A 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 arm."
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, mama; 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.
ROVER'S LAST FIGHT
The little village of Valley Stream nestles peacefully among the woods and 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?
