A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill Part 26

"It's our turn! Umpire says so, didn't you, Chick? Aw, you did, too! I kin understand you better 'n you kin understand yourself. 'Course it's ours. Stop shovin' me, Gussie McGlory, I'll swat yer in the jaw in a minute! Look out, Chick! Look out fer the kid!"

The youngest resident of Bean Alley was probably saved from premature death by the timely appearance of two ladies at the far end of the street.

Chick, recognizing the younger one, started joyfully to meet her, but at sight of her companion he stopped short. For two years he had regarded that plump, smiling, elderly lady as his arch enemy. She was after him.

She wanted to put him in something that sounded like "The Willows Awful Home." Once she had almost gotten him, but Aunt 'Tella interposed. He was not afraid of the truant officer, nor of the cop, although they were generally after him, too, but he had horrible nightmares in which he saw himself being dragged into captivity by this bland lady in the purple dress, who always smiled.

Just as he was seeking a hiding-place sufficiently large to accommodate himself and his charge, he was summoned home. Considerable commotion was apparent in the crowded kitchen and Mr. Flathers was moving about with an alacrity unusual to him.

"Git off your shoes and stockings, Chick, and turn your coat inside out.

Here, I'll hold the baby; yer Mammy's nursing the other one. Shove that beer can under the stove, and hide that there cuckoo clock."

Chick followed instructions with the air of one who understood the situation. It was not the first time he had prepared hurriedly for visitors.

"They're stopping at Jireses'," reported Mr. Flathers from the window.

"Here, take this kid and set out there on the door-step. Don't you dare budge till they've saw you and spoke to you."

Chick resumed his position on the door-step with a heavy heart. The line of battle had been pushed south, and he was completely out of the firing line.

His bare feet and legs were cold in the biting November air, and he had jolted the baby until he felt there were no more jolts left in him. It was, moreover, a terrifying business to sit there and calmly wait his fate.

"Them's them!" announced Skeeter Sheeley, racing down the alley. "They give Mr. Jires some oranges. If they give you one, you goin' to gimme half?"

Chick was too miserable to answer. The bars of an inst.i.tution seemed to be already closing upon him.

Mrs. Ivy, holding her skirts very high and picking her way gingerly around the frozen puddles, was the first to reach him.

"Ah! Here's our good little friend Rick, or d.i.c.k, is it? And this is the sweet little baby sister that G.o.d sent you."

"Naw it ain't," said Skeeter; "that there's a boy, an' it ain't no kin to him. Its paw's in the pen, an' its maw's up fer ninety days, an' its jes' boardin' at his house."

"The case that was reported for the Home," said Mrs. Ivy, turning with a significant nod to her companion who had just come up.

At the word "home" Chick shuddered. It was the most terrible word in the English language to him.

"What's the matter with your thumb, old fellow?" Miss Lady asked, seeing his frightened look. "Come here, Skeeter, and tell me what he says."

She relieved Chick of the young person whose parents were not in a position to minister to his wants, and sat on the door-step between the two boys, listening with flattering attention to a detailed description of each hero's wounds and scars and how they had been received.

Mrs. Ivy, meanwhile, a veritable spider in the midst of a web of inst.i.tutions, was warily planning to ensnare every helpless, poverty-stricken fly that came her way. To her, the web was not made for the fly, but the fly for the web; supplying flies was her chief occupation.

Standing just inside the kitchen door with her skirts still gathered carefully about her, she viewed her surroundings with mournful sympathy.

"The fact are," Phineas was saying as he held his coat together at the collar, in a pretended effort to conceal his lack of a shirt, "that we ain't been prosperin' since you was last here. Looks like the hand of the Lord--"

"Ah, Mr. Flathers," remonstrated Mrs. Ivy, with a finger on her lip, "never forget that whom He loveth He chasteneth."

"I don't, Mrs. Ivy, I don't. I keep that in mind. If it wasn't fer that, Mrs. Ivy, I declare I don't know what I would do. Now you comin' to-day was a answer to prayer! I just ast that some way would be pervided 'fore the rent man come back at six o'clock. I didn't say in my prayer _what_ way, I just said _a_ way, that _a_ way would be pervided. And when I seen you and the young lady turnin' in the alley, I sez to Maria, 'never try to shake my faith no more, the clouds has been lifted!'"

Mrs. Ivy, who was much more given to dispensing morals than money, shifted her position.

"Mr. Flathers," she said, looking at him with what she conceived to be a searching glance, "do you ever drink?"

a.s.suring himself that Chick had gotten the can quite out of sight, Phineas looked at her reproachfully:

"Me? Why, Mrs. Ivy, I thought everybody knowed that since I joined the Church--of course I ain't denying that there _was_ a time when I knowed the taste of liquor. There ain't no good denying that, and, besides confession is good fer me, it humbles my spirit, Mrs. Ivy, it keeps me from being a publican."

"And tobacco?" queried Mrs. Ivy. "Liquor and tobacco go hand in hand, they are twin evils. Are you addicted to the use of tobacco?"

"Not me!" said Phineas, truthfully for once. "I ain't soiled my lips with a seegar for over twenty years, and you couldn't git me to chew if you chloroformed me. Ef liquor is the drink, terbaccer is the food of the devil, as I see it." Mrs. Ivy beamed upon him, as she opened the silver bag at her belt. "I shall report your case at our next meeting,"

she said with enthusiasm. "I shall quote your very words. And now I am going to pin this little badge on you, this little white badge that tells the world you belong to the Anti-Tobacco League. You have the honor of wearing what few of our greatest statesmen can wear! You have proven that a humble laborer can lead the way to Reform."

Miss Lady appeared at this point with the Boarder, who like most individuals of his cla.s.s, complained continuously of the quant.i.ty and quality of his food.

"You find us in a bad way, Mis' Squeerington," Phineas said, offering her a bottomless chair with the air of a Christian martyr. "If my sister Myrtella knowed the half of what we was pa.s.sin' through she wouldn't continue to steel her heart against us."

"Myrtella's heart's all right," said Miss Lady cheerfully; "she takes care of Chick, doesn't she?"

"She does, mam, in a way. But there's heavy expenses on a pore man with a family. Mrs. Flathers now ain't been able to have a see-ance since before the baby come. She did give one trance settin' yesterday, but she says she don't know what's got into her, she feels so sort of weak like!"

"How long has she been taking care of this other baby?" Miss Lady asked.

"Most ever since ours come. The Juvenile Court was looking round fer some one to nurse him till his maw got out of the jail hospital. I sez to Maria, 'Here's a chanct to do a good Christian act an' earn a honest penny. We'll take it in an' treat it like our own, sez I, an' the Lord will not fergit us, sez I!"

The Boarder, taking advantage of this a.s.surance of hospitality, set up such a peremptory demand for food, that Miss Lady was compelled to walk the floor with him.

"Where is Mrs. Flathers?" she asked in despair. "Can't we give him a bottle or something?"

Maria, more limp, and inanimate than usual, came out of the dim interior of the adjoining room, carrying a yet more limp and inanimate bundle which she exchanged with Miss Lady for hers, and silently retired into the inner room where she was followed by Mrs. Ivy.

"An' this here is ours!" exclaimed Phineas, bending with sudden enthusiasm over the child in Miss Lady's arms, and tenderly lifting the shawl from the weazened face and tiny claw-like hands. "This here is Loreny. There ain't nary one of the rest of 'em lived over two weeks, an' this here one is goin' on four. Kinder looks like we're goin' to keep her with us, don't it?"

Miss Lady could find no answer. The white lips and the blue circles about the small, sunken eyes, bespoke the same disinclination to risk life under such circ.u.mstances as had been shown by all the other little Flatherses.

"Course she ain't like that other baby," Phineas went on with genuine earnestness, "but then he's a boy, an' eats more. She's goin' to git fat an' pretty, ain't you, Loreny?"

He put his coa.r.s.e brown thumb into the little hand which closed about it and clung to it, and sat watching her, unmindful of his visitor.

"She don't look what you'd call strong," he went on, anxiously, "but you wouldn't say she was sick, would you?"

"I am afraid I should," Miss Lady said gravely; "she looks very sick to me."

"She does? Then I'd better git the doctor," Phineas rose hurriedly, then sat down again. "But he never done the others no good. Maria always contended it was him that killed 'em. Ain't there somethin' we kin do?

Don't you know somethin'?"

"Yes, I think I do, only you may not be willing to do it."

"You try me. I'll do anything you say, Miss. If the Lord will only spare her--"