City and town life -- Fiction; Short stories, American
But while we were a-staring at each other, the Switzerland maid come
a-racing back. Seems she'd been up to the depot, a block away, and
Copper, the baggageman, had noticed a queer-looking kid on the platform
when some folks got off Number 16 that had gone through west an hour or
so back. Copper thought the kid was with them, but he didn't notice it
special. Where the folks went to, nobody knew.
"Down on the Flats somewhere, that's where its folks went," says Mis'
Sykes. "Sure to. Well, then, they'll be looking for it. We must get it
in the papers."
We raced around and advertised that little boy in the _Daily_. The
Friendship Village _Evening Daily_ goes to press almost any time, so if
you happen to hit it right, you can get things in most up to seven
o'clock. Quite often the _Evening Daily_ comes after we're all in bed,
and we get up and read it to go to sleep by. We told the sheriff, and he
come up that evening and clucked at the little boy, without getting a
word out of him, no more than we could. The news flew round town, and
lots of folks come up to see him. It was more exciting than a
night-blooming cereus night.
But not a soul come to claim him. He might have dropped down from inside
the air.
"Well," says Mis' Sykes, "if some of them foreigners down on the Flats
_has_ lost him, it'll be us that'll have to find him. They ain't capable
of nothing."
That was how Mis' Sykes, and Mis' Toplady, and Mame Holcomb and I
hitched up and went down to the Flats and took the baby with us, right
after breakfast next morning, to try our best to locate him.
The Flats are where the Friendship Village ex-foreigners live--ain't it
scandalous the way we keep on calling ex-foreigners foreigners? And
then, of course, nobody's so very foreign after you get acquainted.
Americans, even, ain't so very foreign to Europeans after they get to
know us, they say. I'd been down there often enough to see my
wash-woman, or dicker for a load of wood, or buy new garden truck, or
get somebody to houseclean, but I didn't know anybody down there to
visit--and none of us ladies did. The Flats were like that. The Flats
didn't seem ever to count real regular in real Friendship Village
doings. For instance, the town was just getting in sewerage, but it
wasn't to go in down on the Flats, and nobody seemed surprised. The only
share the Flats seemed to have in sewerage was to house the long, red
line of bunk cars, where the men lived, drawn up on a spur of track by
the gas house.
It was a heavenly day, warm and cool and bright, with a little whiff of
wind, like a sachet bag, thrown in. We had the Sykeses' surrey and old
white horse, and Mis' Toplady and Mame and me squoze on the back seat
so's to let Mis' Sykes, that was driving, have sitting beside her in
plain sight that little boy in his blazing red dress.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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