Dave Ranney | Page 7

see your check?"
My dear mother asked me that, never thinking that her boy had taken it.
Oh! if I had had the courage to tell her then and there, how much
misery and trouble it would have saved me in after life! But I was a
moral coward, and I said, "No, mother; where did you put it?" I had her
guessing whether she really put it in the pitcher or not.

There was a regular hunt for that check, and I hunted as much as any
one, but it could not be found. Mother did not know much about banks
in those days, but some one told her about a week after that she ought
to go to the bank and stop payment on the check. That sounded good to
mother, and she said, "Dave, you and I will go to the bank and stop
payment on that check." I was in it for fair this time. The only chance I
had was in the teller not recognizing me.
We went to the bank, and mother told the teller about the
lost--stolen--check, and for him to see that it wasn't paid. He said, "All
right, madam, I'll not pay it if it is not already paid." He looked over the
books and brought back the lost check. I had stood in the background
all this time. Then my mother asked him whom he paid it to. He said it
was hard for him to recall just then, "But I think I paid it to a boy," he
said. "Yes, it was a boy, for I recollect that he had as dirty a face and
hands as ever I saw." Mother pulled me up in front of him and told him
to look at me and see if I was the boy. He looked at me for a minute or
so--it seemed to me like an hour--then said, "No, that is not the boy that
cashed the check, nothing like him. I am sure I should know that boy."
In after years, when I was lined up in front of detectives for
identification for some crime, identified or not, I always thought of a
dirty face being a good disguise.
On the way home from the bank mother asked me all sorts of questions
about boys I knew; if they had dirty faces and so on, but I did not know
any such boys, so the check business died out. She little thought that
her own boy was the thief, and she blamed my cousin, who was
boarding with us at the time.
My grandfather was still with us, and he had quite a sum of money
saved. He wanted some money, and he and I went to the bank and he
drew out fifty dollars in gold. There was a premium on gold at that time,
and he received two twenty-dollar gold-pieces and one ten. Well, that
night he lost one of the twenty-dollar gold-pieces and never found it.
There was a hot time the next morning, for he was sure he had it when
he went to bed. My father was blamed for that, so you see the innocent
suffer for the guilty.

I had quite a time with the money while it lasted, went out to the old
Bowery Theatre, and had a good time in general. I little thought then
that in after years I would be sitting on the old Bowery steps, down and
out, without a cent in my pocket and without a friend in the world.
LOSING A POSITION
I was a boy of fourteen at this time, working in a civil engineer's office
for three dollars per week, but I knew, young as I was, that as a
profession engineering was not for me. I knew that to take it up I
needed a good education, and that I did not have. I didn't like the trade,
anyway, and didn't care whether I worked or not. That is the reason I
lost my job.
One afternoon my employer sent me up Newark Avenue for a suit of
clothes that had been made to order. He told me to get them and bring
them back as soon as I could. I must say right here that my employer
was a good man, and he took quite a liking to me. Many a time he told
me he would make a great engineer out of me. I often look back and
ask myself the question, "Did I miss my vocation?" And then there
comes a voice, which I recognize as God's, saying, "You had to go
through all this in order to help others with the same temptations and
the same sins," and I say, "Amen."
After getting the clothes I went back to the