Tom Grogan Part 5

night. If I had me way, ye would walk, but it would be on yer uppers, wid yer bare feet to the road."

Crimmins again attempted to speak, but she raised her arm threateningly: "Now, if it's walkin' ye are, ye can begin right away. Let me see ye earn yer wages down that garden an' into the road. Come, lively now, before I disgrace meself a-layin' hands on the likes of ye!"

V. A WORD FROM THE TENEMENTS

One morning Patsy came up the garden path limping on his crutch; the little fellow's eyes were full of tears. He had been out with his goat when some children from the tenements surrounded his cart, pitched it into the ditch, and followed him half way home, calling "Scab! scab!" at the top of their voices. Cully heard his cries, and ran through the yard to meet him, his anger rising at every step. To lay hands on Patsy was, to Cully, the unpardonable sin. Ever since the day, five years before, when Tom had taken him into her employ, a homeless waif of the streets,--his father had been drowned from a ca.n.a.l-boat she was unloading,--and had set him down beside Patsy's crib to watch while she was at her work, Jennie being at school, Cully had loved the little cripple with the devotion of a dog to its master. Lawless, rough, often cruel, and sometimes vindictive as Cully was to others, a word from Patsy humbled and softened him.

And Patsy loved Cully. His big, broad chest, stout, straight legs, strong arms and hands, were his admiration and constant pride. Cully was his champion and his ideal. The waif's recklessness and audacity were to him only evidences of so much brains and energy.

This love between the lads grew stronger after Tom had sent to Dublin for her old father, that she might have "a man about the house." Then a new blessing came, not only into the lives of both the lads, but into the whole household as well. Mullins, in his later years, had been a dependent about Trinity College, and constant a.s.sociation with books and students had given him a taste for knowledge denied his daughter. Tom had left home when a girl. In the long winter nights during the slack season, after the stalls were bedded and the horses were fed and watered and locked up for the night, the old man would draw up his chair to the big kerosene lamp on the table, and tell the boys stories--they listening with wide-open eyes, Cully interrupting the narrative every now and then by such asides as "No flies on them fellers, wuz ther', Patsy? They wuz daisies, they wuz. Go on, Pop; it's better'n a circus;"

while Patsy would cheer aloud at the downfall of the vanquished, with their "three thousand lance-bearers put to death by the sword," waving his crutch over his head in his enthusiasm.

Jennie would come in too, and sit by her mother; and after Nilsson's encounter with Quigg--an incident which greatly advanced him in Tom's estimation--Cully would be sent to bring him in from his room over the stable and give him a chair with the others, that he might learn the language easier. At these times it was delightful to watch the expression of pride and happiness that would come over Tom's face as she listened to her father's talk.

"But ye have a great head, Gran'pop," she would say. "Cully, ye blatherin' idiot, why don't ye brace up an' git some knowledge in yer head? Sure, Gran'pop, Father McCluskey ain't in it wid ye a minute. Ye could down the whole gang of 'em." And the old man would smile faintly and say he had heard the young gentlemen at the college recite the stories so many times he could never forget them.

In this way the boys grew closer together, Patsy cramming himself from books during the day in order to tell Cully at night all about the Forty Thieves boiled in oil, or Ali Baba and his donkey, or poor man Friday to whom Robinson Crusoe was so kind; and Cully relating in return how Jimmie Finn smashed Pat Gilsey's face because he threw stones at his sister, ending with a full account of a dog-fight which a "snoozer of a cop" stopped with his club.

So when Patsy came limping up the garden path this morning, rubbing his eyes, his voice choking, and the tears streaming, and, burying his little face in Cully's jacket, poured out his tale of insult and suffering, that valiant defender of the right pulled his cap tight over his eyes and began a still-hunt through the tenements. There, as he afterwards expressed it, he "mopped up the floor" with one after another of the ringleaders, beginning with young Billy McGaw, Dan's eldest son and Cully's senior.

Tom was dumfounded at the attack on Patsy. This was a blow upon which she had not counted. To strike her Patsy, her cripple, her baby! The cowardice of it incensed her, She knew instantly that her affairs must have been common talk about the tenements to have produced so great an effect upon the children. She felt sure that their fathers and mothers had encouraged them in it.

In emergencies like this it was never to the old father that she turned.

He was too feeble, too much a thing of the past. While to a certain extent he influenced her life, standing always for the right and always for the kindest thing she could do, yet when it came to times of action and danger she felt the need of a younger and more vigorous mind. It was on Jennie, really more her companion than her daughter, that she depended for counsel and sympathy at these times.

Tom did not underestimate the gravity of the situation. Up to that point in her career she had fought only the cold, the heat, the many weary hours of labor far into the night, and now and then some man like McGaw.

But this stab from out the dark was a danger to which she was unused.

She saw in this last move of McGaw's, aided as he was by the Union, not only a determination to ruin her, but a plan to divide her business among a set of men who hated her as much on account of her success as for anything else. A few more horses and carts and another barn or two, and she herself would become a hated capitalist. That she had stood out in the wet and cold herself, hours at a time, like any man among them; that she had, in her husband's early days, helped him feed and bed their one horse, often currying him herself; that when she and her Tom had moved to Rockville with their savings and there were three horses to care for and her husband needed more help than he could hire, she had brought her little baby Patsy to the stable while she worked there like a man; that during all this time she had cooked and washed and kept the house tidy for four people; that she had done all these things she felt would not count now with the Union, though each member of it was a bread-winner like herself.

She knew what power it wielded. There had been the Martin family, honest, hardworking people, who had come down from Haverstraw--the man and wife and their three children--and moved into the new tenement with all their nice furniture and new carpets. Tom had helped them unload these things from the brick-sloop that brought them. A few weeks after, poor Martin, still almost a stranger, had been brought home from the gas-house with his head laid open, because he had taken the place of a Union man discharged for drunkenness, and lingered for weeks until he died. Then the widow, with her children about her, had been put aboard another sloop that was going back to her old home. Tom remembered, as if it were yesterday, the heap of furniture and little pile of kitchen things sold under the red flag outside the store near the post-office.

She had seen, too, the suffering and misery of her neighbors during the long strike at the brewery two years before, and the moving in and out from house to tenement and tenement to shanty, with never a day's work afterward for any man who left his job. She had helped many of the men who, three years before, had been driven out of work by the majority vote of the Carpenters' Union, and who dared not go back and face the terrible excommunication, the social boycott, with all its insults and cruelties. She shuddered as she thought again of her suspicions years ago when the bucket had fallen that crushed in her husband's chest, and sent him to bed for months, only to leave it a wrecked man. The rope that held the bucket had been burned by acid, Dr. Mason said. Some grudge of the Union, she had always felt, was paid off then.

She knew what the present trouble meant, now that it was started, and she knew in what it might end. But her courage never wavered. She ran over in her mind the names of the several men who were fighting her--McGaw, for whom she had a contempt; Dempsey and Jimmie Brown, of the executive committee, both liquor-dealers; Paterson, foreman of the gas-house; and the rest--dangerous enemies, she knew.

That night she sent for Nilsson to come to the house; heard from him, word for word, of Quigg's effort to corrupt him; questioned Patsy closely, getting the names of the children who had abused him; then calling Jennie into her bedroom, she locked the door behind them.

When they reentered the sitting-room, an hour later, Jennie's lips were quivering. Tom's mouth was firmly set. Her mind was made up.

She would fight it out to the bitter end.

VI. THE BIG GRAY GOES HUNGRY

That invincible spirit which dwelt in Tom's breast--that spirit which had dared Lathers, outwitted Duffy, cowed Crimmins, and braved the Union, did not, strange to say, dominate all the members of her own household. One defied her. This was no other than that despoiler of new-washed clothes, old harness, wagon-grease, time-books, and spring flowers, that Arab of the open lot, Stumpy the goat.

This supremacy of the goat had lasted since the eventful morning when, only a kid of tender days, he had come into the stable-yard and wobbled about on his uncertain legs, nestling down near the door where Patsy lay. During all these years he had ruled over Tom. At first because his fuzzy white back and soft, silky legs had been so precious to the little cripple, and later because of his inexhaustible energy, his aggressiveness, and his marvelous activity. Brave spirits have fainted at the sight of spiders, others have turned pale at lizards, and some have shivered when cats crossed their paths. The only thing Tom feared on any number of legs, from centipedes to men, was Stumpy.

"Git out, ye imp of Satan!" she would say, raising her hand when he wandered too near; "or I'll smash ye!" The next instant she would be dodging behind the cart out of the way of Stumpy's lowered horns, with a scream as natural and as uncontrollable as that of a schoolgirl over a mouse. When he stood in the path cleared of snow from house to stable door, with head down, prepared to dispute every inch of the way with her, she would tramp yards around him, up to her knees in the drift, rather than face his obstinate front.

The basest of ingrat.i.tude actuated the goat. When the accident occurred that gained him his sobriquet and lost him his tail, it was Tom's quickness of hand alone that saved the remainder of his kidship from disappearing as his tail had done. Indeed, she not only choked the dog who attacked him, until he loosened his hold from want of breath, but she threw him over the stable-yard fence as an additional mark of her displeasure.

In spite of her fear of him, Tom never dispossessed Stumpy. That her Patsy loved him insured him his place for life.

So Stumpy roamed through yard, kitchen, and stable, stalking over bleaching sheets, burglarizing the garden gate, and grazing wherever he chose.

The goat inspired no fear in anybody else. Jennie would chase him out of her way a dozen times a day, and Cully would play bullfight with him, and Carl and the other men would accord him his proper place, spanking him with the flat of a shovel whenever he interfered with their daily duties, or shying a corn-cob after him when his alertness carried him out of their reach.

This afternoon Jennie had missed her blue-checked ap.r.o.n. It had been drying on the line outside the kitchen door five minutes before. There was no one at home but herself, and she had seen n.o.body pa.s.s the door.

Perhaps the ap.r.o.n had blown over into the stable-yard. If it had, Carl would be sure to have seen it. She knew Carl had come home; she had been watching for him through the window. Then she ran in for her shawl.

Carl was rubbing down the Big Gray. He had been hauling ice all the morning for the brewery. The Gray was under the cart-shed, a flood of winter sunlight silvering his s.h.a.ggy mane and restless ears. The Swede was sc.r.a.ping his sides with the currycomb, and the Big Gray, accustomed to Cully's gentler touch, was resenting the familiarity by biting at the tippet wound about the neck of the young man.

Suddenly Carl raised his head--he had caught a glimpse of a flying ap.r.o.n whipping round the stable door. He knew the pattern. It always gave him a lump in his throat, and some little creepings down his back when he saw it. Then he laid down the currycomb. The next instant there came a sound as of a barrel-head knocked in by a mixing-shovel, and Stumpy flew through the door, followed by Carl on the run. The familiar bit of calico was Jennie's lost ap.r.o.n. One half was inside the goat, the other half was in the hand of the Swede.

Carl hesitated for a moment, looked cautiously about the yard, and walked slowly toward the house, his eyes on the fragments. He never went to the house except when he was invited, either to hear Pop read or to take his dinner with the other men. At this instant Jennie came running out, the shawl about her head.

"Oh, Carl, did you find my ap.r.o.n? It blew away, and I thought it might have gone into the yard."

"Yas, mees; an' da goat see it too--luke!" extending the tattered fragments, anger and sorrow struggling for the mastery in his face.

"Well, I never! Carl, it was a bran'-new one. Now just see, all the strings torn off and the top gone! I'm just going to give Stumpy a good beating."

Carl suggested that he run after the goat and bring him back; but Jennie thought he was down the road by this time, and Carl had been working all the morning and must be tired. Besides, she must get some wood.

Carl instantly forgot the goat. He had forgotten everything, indeed, except the trim little body who stood before him looking into his eyes.

He glowed all over with inward warmth and delight. n.o.body had ever cared before whether he was tired. When he was a little fellow at home at Memlo his mother would sometimes worry about his lifting the big baskets of fish all day, but he could not remember that anybody else had ever given his feelings a thought. All this flashed through his mind as he returned Jennie's look.

"No, no! I not tire--I brang da wood." And then Jennie said she never meant it, and Carl knew she didn't, of course; and then she said she had never thought of such a thing, and he agreed to that; and they talked so long over it, standing out in the radiance of the noonday sun, the color coming and going in both their faces,--Carl playing aimlessly with his tippet ta.s.sel, and Jennie plaiting and pinching up the ruined ap.r.o.n,--that the fire in the kitchen stove went out, and the Big Gray grew hungry and craned his long neck around the shed and whinnied for Carl, and even Stumpy the goat forgot his hair-breadth escape, and returned near enough to the scene of the robbery to look down at it from the hill above.

There is no telling how long the Big Gray would have waited if Cully had not come home to dinner, bringing another horse with Patsy perched on his back. The brewery was only a short distance, and Tom always gave her men a hot meal at the house whenever it was possible. Had any other horse been neglected, Cully would not have cared; but the Big Gray which he had driven ever since the day Tom brought him home,--"Old Blowhard,"

as he would often call him (the Gray was a bit wheezy),--the Big Gray without his dinner!

"Hully gee! Look at de bloke a-jollying Jinnie, an' de Blowhard a-starvin'. Say, Patsy,"--lifting him down,--"hold de line till I git de Big Gray a bite. Git on ter Carl, will ye! I'm a-goin'--ter--tell de--boss,"--with a threatening air, weighing each word--"jes soon as she gits back. Ef I don't I'm a chump."

At sight of the boys, Jennie darted into the house, and Carl started for the stable, his head in the clouds, his feet on air.

"No; I feed da horse, Cully,"--jerking at his halter to get him away from Cully.

"A h.e.l.l ov 'er lot ye will! I'll feed him meself. He's been home an hour now, an' he ain't half rubbed down."

Carl made a grab for Cully, who dodged and ran under the cart. Then a lump of ice whizzed past Carl's ear.

"Here, stop that!" said Tom, entering the gate. She had been in the city all the morning--"to look after her poor Tom," Pop said. "Don't ye be throwing things round here, or I'll land on top of ye."