When they would thrust at, or parry, the noses of
his champing horses, making them swing their heads
and move their feet, disturbing a solid dreamy repose,
he swore at the men as fools, for he himself could
perceive that Providence had caused it clearly to
be written, that he and his team had the unalienable
right to stand in the proper path of the sun chariot,
and if they so minded, obstruct its mission or take
a wheel off.
And, perhaps, if the god-driver had an ungovernable
desire to step down, put up his flame-colored fists
and manfully dispute the right of way, he would have
probably been immediately opposed by a scowling mortal
with two sets of very hard knuckles.
It is possible, perhaps, that this young man would
have derided, in an axle-wide alley, the approach
of a flying ferry boat. Yet he achieved a respect
for a fire engine. As one charged toward his
truck, he would drive fearfully upon a sidewalk, threatening
untold people with annihilation. When an engine
would strike a mass of blocked trucks, splitting it
into fragments, as a blow annihilates a cake of ice,
Jimmie’s team could usually be observed high
and safe, with whole wheels, on the sidewalk.
The fearful coming of the engine could break up the
most intricate muddle of heavy vehicles at which the
police had been swearing for the half of an hour.
A fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling
thing that he loved with a distant dog-like devotion.
They had been known to overturn street-cars.
Those leaping horses, striking sparks from the cobbles
in their forward lunge, were creatures to be ineffably
admired. The clang of the gong pierced his breast
like a noise of remembered war.
When Jimmie was a little boy, he began to be arrested.
Before he reached a great age, he had a fair record.
He developed too great a tendency to climb down from
his truck and fight with other drivers. He had
been in quite a number of miscellaneous fights, and
in some general barroom rows that had become known
to the police. Once he had been arrested for
assaulting a Chinaman. Two women in different
parts of the city, and entirely unknown to each other,
caused him considerable annoyance by breaking forth,
simultaneously, at fateful intervals, into wailings
about marriage and support and infants.
Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening,
said wonderingly and quite reverently: “Deh
moon looks like hell, don’t it?”
The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle.
She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production
of a tenement district, a pretty girl.
None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her
veins. The philosophers up-stairs, down-stairs
and on the same floor, puzzled over it.
When a child, playing and fighting with gamins in
the street, dirt disguised her. Attired in tatters
and grime, she went unseen.
