Keith was too astonished to be frightened at once.  He could not understand what made the man act in this way.  Then another man came out in a rush and began to beat the legs of the man in the gutter with his hands, and Keith suddenly noticed that little blue flames were dancing up and down the grimy leathern trousers of the first man.

The memory of the night when the church burned leaped into his mind, making him turn instinctively toward the passageway and his mother’s lap.

At that moment a third man appeared carrying a big tank full of water which he poured over the man in the gutter.  The latter got on his feet and limped back into the distillery, supported by his two comrades.

Keith was left behind, trembling a little and gazing curiously at the hanging head of the dray-horse which had not made the slightest movement during the previous excitement.

“He’ll have to go to bed,” said a sleepy voice at his shoulder just then.

Keith swung around as if touched by an electric shock.  Before him he saw another small boy, apparently of his own age, but a little taller, and light-haired like himself.

“What’s your name,” asked Keith as soon as he caught his breath.

“Johan,” answered the other stolidly, but not unfriendly.

“Have you got another name like me?”

“My name is Johan Peter Gustafsson,” was the reply given in the tone of a lesson painfully learned.

“Where do you live?”

“Right here.”

“Not in our house,” Keith protested.

“No, down there,” Johan explained, pointing to the little side door leading into the courtyard of one of the corner houses at the Quay.

“What’s your father?” Keith continued his cross-examination.

“Vaktmaestare” said Johan indifferently.

“So is mine,” Keith cried eagerly.  “Have you got a bank, too?”

Johan shook his head as if unable to grasp what Keith meant.

“My popsey works in the office down there,” he said, “and we live beside it, and at night I go with popsey when he carries all the mail to the postoffice.”

“Why do you call him popsey,” inquired Keith, fascinated by the new word and wondering if he would dare use it to his own father.

“Because that’s what he is,” Johan declared.

A few minutes later they were playing together as if they had known each other for ever.  They had just discovered an unusually large and tempting pin in a crack at the bottom of the gutter, when Keith heard his mother calling from the window above: 

“What are you doing, Keith?”

“Oh, just playing,” he replied without looking up, forgetful of everything but the pin that would not come out of the crack.

“Who is that with you?”

“That is Johan,” Keith shouted back triumphantly, “and his papa is a vaktmaestare, too.”

“Come right up and let me speak to you,” was the insistant rejoinder from above.