Elite Restaurant, stung him with that most insulting word in any known tongue—­“Lache!”—­and threatened him with uplifted cane; and poor Plooie slunk away.  But I think it was the fact that he who stayed at home when others went forward had set a picture of Albert of Belgium in the window of his cubbyhole that most exasperated us against him.  Tactless, to say the least!  His call grew quavery and furtive.  Annie Oombrella ceased to sing at work.  Matters looked ill for the Garins.

The evil came to a head the week after David and Jonathan broke off all relations.  Perhaps that tragedy of shattered friendship (afterward rejoined through the agency of the great peacemaker, Death) had got on our nerves.  Ordinarily, had Plooie chased a small boy who had tipped a barrel down his basement steps, nothing would have come of it.  But the chase took him into the midst of a group of the younger and more boisterous element, returning from a business meeting of the Gentlemen’s Sons of Avenue B, and before he could turn, they had surrounded him.

“Here’s our little ’ee-ro!” “Looka the Frenchy that won’t fight!” “Safety first, hey, Plooie?” “Charge umbrellas—­backward, march!”

Plooie did his best to break for a run through, which was the worst thing he could have tried.  They collared him.  By that contact he became their captive, their prey.  What to do with him?  To loose a prisoner, once in the hand, is an unthinkable anti-climax.  Somebody developed an inspirational thought:  “Ride him on a rail!”

Near by, a house front under repair supplied a scantling.  Plooie was hustled upon it.  He fell off.  They jammed him back again.  He clung, wide-eyed, white-faced, and silent.  The mob, for it was that now, bore him with jeers and jokes and ribaldry along the edge of the park.

When they came within my ken he was riding high, and the mob was being augmented momentarily from every quarter.  I looked about for Terry the Cop.  But Terry was elsewhere.  It is not beyond the bounds of reasonable probability that he had absented himself on purpose.  “God hates a coward” is a tenet of Terry’s creed.  I confess to a certain sympathy with it myself.  After all, a harsh lesson might not be amiss for Plooie, the recusant.  Composing my soul to a non-intervention policy, I leaned back on my bench, when a pitiful sight ruined my neutrality.

Along the outer edge of the compact mob trotted little Annie Oombrella.  From time to time she dashed herself blindly against that human wall, which repulsed her not too roughly and with indulgent laughter.  Their concern was not with her.  It was with the coward; their prisoner, delivered by fate to the stern decrees of mob justice.  I could hear his voice now, calling out to her in their own language across the supervening heads: 

“Do not have fear, my little one.  They do me no harm.  Go you home, little cat.  Soon I come also.  Do not fear.”

From his forehead ran a little stream of blood.  But there was that in his face which told me that if he was fearful it was only for her.  His voice, steady and piercing, overrode the clamor of the crowd.  I began to entertain doubts as to his essential cowardice.