Ann Arbor (Mich.) -- Fiction; Short stories, American
Suddenly Adams pulled himself together. He began to experience a
livelier interest in the dark picture of the street, with its broad
curbs, its iron fences, dark hedges, and wide yards. He pressed his face
against the window in the cab door, and now and again twisted his neck
to gaze as far back down the street as the swift motion of the vehicle
would permit.
He remembered definitely, vividly, certain landmarks of his young
boyhood, as he was whirled on, noiselessly, save for the rythmic
_clackety-clack_ of the horse's hoofs on the echoing asphalt. There was
the house from the side yard of which he had once, as a tiny lad, stolen
a great armful of roses. There, again, was the house with the smoke tree
near the porch behind which Pauline, his little sister, and he had once
hidden until the policeman passed, indolently swinging his night stick.
Adams smiled at the recollection.
The cab came opposite a tall apartment house at the junction of a
cross-town car line. On the ground now occupied by the ungainly,
rambling pile of stone, he remembered vividly, had stood, when he was a
very small boy--hardly big enough to push his cart--a little shack
occupied by an old cobbler, deserted in his age by a son who had robbed
him. Very many were the hours he had spent in that little shop. He
recalled certain of those hours with a momentary pang of sadness. The
cobbler had been a soldier in Poland, in his time, and was wont to tell
great stories of his own valor, to which the yellow-headed lad, all
forgetful of his mission and his cart, had listened wide-eyed and
open-mouthed. The memory came swift and certain and distinct in detail
and in the richness of it Adams shrank from the ugly stone pile in
passing, as though it were a horrid thing thus to thrust itself upon a
young man's memory of his little boyhood.
As he dreamed thus the cab turned a corner, suddenly. The rich
residential thoroughfare vanished like the palace in the pantomime, and
Adams, his face still close to the glass, saw a row of little, squat,
mean houses, set regularly behind low white picket fences. Only here and
there a light shone from small, square windows. The street seemed
totally deserted, save for a single dog that he saw crawl under one of
the low latched gates and vanish behind a house that was like all the
others in the little squalid street. And as he noted these things, the
cab pulled up before such another house, and, mechanically, he passed
his hand over his forehead, as a child does when awakened.
A brief parley ensued with the burly driver of the cab, comical in his
bristling fur cape.
"Kin yeh git 'im out?" he asked.
"Yes."
One of the windows in the second story of the cottage before which the
cab had stopped, was aglow, and across the drawn shade a shadow passed,
and passed again.
Adams shook the sleeper in the cab. Finally after a series of muffled
grunts and grumblings that were like remonstrances, the man was gotten
out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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