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War On The Goats
by
“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.