I promised to go to the meeting, and that meant that I couldn't go home
to supper, because it was so far to walk back. And when I come out the
door, there was Mr. Carney's car, and him walking toward me. I never
stopped a minute. I walked straight through the girls and got into his
car. He jumped in after me and banged the door. I heard the girls
titter. "You glorious thing," I heard him say; and I says, low:
"I've got one errand, though. Will you take me there?"
"Anywhere under heaven," he says.
CHAPTER VII
I showed Mr. Carney which way. We went past the girls, and round the
corner, and straight down the narrow street where we always walked
eating our lunch. I motioned where to stop. I jumped out. Sergeant Ebbit
was alone just inside the door of the police station.
"Hello, Beauty," he says; "what can I do for you?"
I says, "I want you to come out here and arrest a fresh young guy with a
car, that's been bothering me."
He jumped up and followed. He was new there, as Rose had said, and then
he kind of liked me, too. I'd known that several days, and I was
depending on it now. He come hurrying, like I thought he would, and he
says, "I know them fool kids, and I'll learn 'em, if you say so." And
before he see Mr. Carney he blew his whistle.
"That's him," I says, pointing to the little shiny car.
It makes me laugh now to remember the sergeant's face. But another
policeman was coming, running. And folks stopped and stared. And I
slipped out the station door quick, and turned the corner and dodged
straight across the factory yard and took to my heels.
It was after six o'clock, so the streets were alive. I walked along,
never noticing where I was going. I looked down the street. As far as I
could see there went the heads, men and women, bobbing along home. Half
of them, I thought, had just the same kind of box to live in that Mis'
Bingy and I had. Yet there they was, going to work every day by
clockwork, always thinking something good was going to come of it. I
tramped along with them. There was something good in the way our feet
all come down on the walk together. In spite of everything, I felt fine.
But I guess that was because I was young and well. Some of them that
passed me, their heads didn't stay up and their feet dragged. And they
didn't seem to know each other was there. If only they could have felt
the good feeling of marching together, it seemed to me they'd be less
tired.
"They've got to find out different," I thought. "How can they?"
The most of them crossed east on Broadway and under a covered place with
bells clanging. I saw the sign "Brooklyn Bridge," so I went up the steps
and out on the bridge, and I walked clear across it and back again. I'll
never forget that walk. I was looking at the others and looking at
them--the folks that was workers, like me. I seemed to know something
about them they didn't know. It seemed as if I had to do something.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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