Nibsys Christmas | Page 9

had
accepted even such charity, and as he lay down on his rough plank he
hugged a little gold locket he wore around his neck, the last link with
better days, and thought, with a hard, dry sob, of home.
In the middle of the night he awoke with a start. The locket was gone.
One of the tramps who slept with him had stolen it. With bitter tears he
went up and complained to the Sergeant at the desk, and the Sergeant
ordered him to be kicked out in the street as a liar, if not a thief. How
should a tramp boy have come honestly by a gold locket? The doorman
put him out as he was bidden, and when the little dog showed its teeth,
a policeman seized it and clubbed it to death on the step.
* * * * *
Far from the slumbering city the rising moon shines over a wide
expanse of glistening water. It silvers the snow upon a barren heath
between two shores, and shortens with each passing minute the

shadows of countless headstones that bear no names, only numbers.
The breakers that beat against the bluff wake not those who sleep there.
In the deep trenches they lie, shoulder to shoulder, an army of brothers,
homeless in life, but here at rest and at peace. A great cross stands upon
the lonely shore. The moon sheds its rays upon it in silent benediction
and floods the garden of the unknown, unmourned dead with its soft
light. Out on the Sound the fishermen see it flashing white against the
starlit sky, and bare their heads reverently as their boats speed by,
borne upon the wings of the west wind.

SKIPPY OF SCRABBLE ALLEY
Skippy was at home in Scrabble Alley. So far as he had ever known
home of any kind it was there in the dark and mouldy basement of the
rear house, farthest back in the gap that was all the builder of those big
tenements had been able to afford of light and of air for the poor people
whose hard-earned wages, brought home every Saturday, left them as
poor as if they had never earned a dollar, to pile themselves up in his
strong-box. The good man had long since been gathered to his
fathers--gone to his better home. It was in the newspapers, and in the
alley it was said that it was the biggest funeral--more than a hundred
carriages, and four black horses to pull the hearse. So it must be true, of
course.
Skippy wondered vaguely, sometimes, when he thought of it, what kind
of a home it might be where people went in a hundred carriages. He
had never sat in one. The nearest he had come to it was when Jimmy
Murphy's cab had nearly run him down once, and his "fare," a big man
with whiskers, had put his head out and angrily called him a brat, and
told him to get out of the way, or he would have him arrested. And
Jimmy had shaken his whip at him and told him to skip home.
Everybody told him to skip. From the policeman on the block to the
hard-fisted man he knew as his father, and who always had a job for
him with the growler when he came home, they were having Skippy on
the run. Probably that was how he got his name. No one cared enough
about it, or about the boy, to find out.

Was there anybody anywhere who cared about boys, anyhow? Were
there any boys in that other home where the carriages and the big
hearse had gone? And if there were, did they have to live in an alley,
and did they ever have any fun? These were thoughts that puzzled
Skippy's young brain once in a while. Not very long or very hard, for
Skippy had not been trained to think; what training the boys picked up
in the alley didn't run much to deep thinking.
Perhaps it was just as well. There were one or two men there who were
said to know a heap, and who had thought and studied it all out about
the landlord and the alley. But it was very tiresome that it should
happen to be just those two, for Skippy never liked them. They were
always cross and ugly, never laughed and carried on as the other men
did once in a while, and made his little feet very tired running with the
growler early and late. He well remembered, too, that it was one of
them who had said, when they brought him home, sore and limping,
from under the wheels of Jimmy Murphy's cab, that he'd been better off
if it had killed him.