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The Ghost Patrol
by
Next morning when a captain came to look over the damages in the burglarized house he found the dining room crudely straightened up and the pantry window locked.
When the baby daughter of Simmons, the plumber of Little Hell, was lost, two men distinctly saw a gray-faced figure in an old-time police helmet leading the lost girl through unfrequented back alleys. They tried to follow, but the mysterious figure knew the egresses better than they did; and they went to report at the station house. Meantime there was a ring at the Simmons’ door, and Simmons found his child on the doormat, crying but safe. In her hand, tight clutched, was the white-cotton glove of a policeman.
Simmons gratefully took the glove to the precinct station. It was a regulation service glove; it had been darned with white-cot
ton thread till the original fabric was almost overlaid with short, inexpert stitches; it had been whitened with pipe-clay, and from one slight brown spot it must have been pressed out with a hot iron. Inside it was stamped, in faded rubber stamping: Dorgan, Patrol, 9th Precinct. The chief took the glove to the commissioner, and between these two harsh, abrupt men there was a pitying silence surcharged with respect.
“We’ll have to take care of the old man,” said the chief at last.
A detective was assigned to the trail of the Ghost Patrol. The detective saw Don Dorgan come out of his shack at three in the morning, stand stretching out his long arms, sniff the late-night dampness, smile as a man will when he starts in on the routine of work that he loves. He was erect; his old uniform was clean-brushed, his linen collar spotless; in his hand he carried one lone glove. He looked to right and left, slipped into an alley, prowled through the darkness, so fleet and soft-stepping that the shadow almost lost him. He stopped at a shutter left open and prodded it shut with his old-time long nightstick. Then he stole back to his shack and went in.
The next day the chief, the commissioner, and a self-appointed committee of inspectors and captains came calling on Don Dorgan at his shack. The old man was a slovenly figure, in open-necked flannel shirt and broken-backed slippers. Yet Dorgan straightened up when they came, and faced them like an old soldier called to duty. The dignitaries sat about awkwardly, while the commissioner tried to explain that the Big Fellows had heard Dorgan was lonely here, and that the department fund was, unofficially, going to send him to Dr. Bristow’s Private Asylum for the Aged and Mentally Infirm—which he euphemistically called “Doc Bristow’s Home. ”
“No,” said Dorgan, “that’s a private booby-hatch. I don’t want to go there. Maybe they got swell rooms, but I don’t want to be stowed away with a bunch of nuts. ”
They had to tell him, at last, that he was frightening the neighborhood with his ghostly patrol and warn him that if he did not give it up they would have to put him away some place.
“But I got to patrol!” he said. “My boys and girls here, they need me to look after them. I sit and I hear voices—voices, I tell you, and they order me out on the beat…. Stick me in the bughouse. I guess maybe it’s better. Say, tell Doc Bristow to not try any shenanigans wit’ me, but let me alone, or I’ll hand him something; I got a wallop like a probationer yet—I have so, Chief. ”
The embarrassed committee left Captain Luccetti with him, to close up the old man’s shack and take him to the asylum in a taxi. The Captain suggested that the old uniform be left behind.