The Angel of the Tenement | Page 8

the sad-eyed Italian, recognizing the superior attraction, shouldered his organ and moved on.
"Hello," cried the man on the wagon seeing the child was not hurt, "yer can soak me one if it ain't little Joe! Where'd yer git dem togs, kid? What'r' yer goin' in fer anyhow, baby perlice?"
The region in the neighborhood of Joey's waist swelled with pride, and his chubby face bore a look of wounded dignity. "There ain't no perlice about this yere, Bill, it's a sojer I be, see?"
Being pressed by Bill to explain himself, Joey unbent. "Yer see, Bill, Dad ain't never showed up fer to git me--seen anything of Dad since he got out, Bill?"
Bill nodded.
"What's he up to now?" queried Joey.
"Shovin' the queer," admitted Bill laconically, "nabbed right off an' in the cooler waitin' his turn, yer won't be troubled by him fer quite a spell, I'll give yer dat fer a pointer, see?"
Joey saw, and for the space of half a second seemed somewhat sobered by the intelligence. "I guessed as much," said he, "yer see, after he got nabbed first, mammy she--yer didn't know as mammy took an' died, did yer, Bill?" and Joey faltered and let the Angel take possession of his cap and transfer it to her own curly head while the Tenement children applauded with jeering commendation, seeing there was a standing feud between Joey and the rest of the juvenile populace over its possession.
"No," Bill allowed, he did not know it, but, seeing that she was always ailing, Bill was in no wise surprised.
"An'--an' since then, I'm stayin' over ter th' Arm'ry wid Old G. A. R. Yer know him, Bill, Old G. A. R. what takes care of th' Arm'ry. He was there afore yer left th' grocery."
Bill remembered the gentleman.
"I stays wid him an' he drills me an' makes me scrub, hully gee, how he do make me wash meself, Bill! An' there's one sojer-man, th' Cap'n, he give me these togs, he did, an' he tol' Old G. A. R. to lem'me eat along wid him over ter Dutchy's Res'traunt," nodding toward a cheap eating-house at the corner, "an' he'd stand fer it. They calls me major, all of 'em to th' Arm'ry, Bill, see?" and Joey was waxing voluble indeed, when he turned to see the mob of jeering children make off up the street, his cap in their midst, while the wailing Angel was being rescued from under the horse's very hoofs by Mary Carew.
Joey put his spirit of inquiry before even his cap. "Is she er Angel, say?" he inquired of Miss Carew, turning his back on Bill without ceremony who with a grin and a nod to the group of Tenement ladies at the door, drove off, "I heerd yer had er Angel over there, but I didn't know as it was straight, what they was givin' me, see?"
"That's what she is, the darling yonder," declared Miss Bonkowski from the curbstone, nodding airily, "you've got it straight this time, Joey. And if what Peter O'Malligan says about your picking her up just now is so, you're welcome to come over some time and play with her."
"Yes, it's true," supplemented Mary Carew, trying to pacify the struggling Angel in her arms who, gazing after the children, showed a decided inclination to descend to human level and mingle with them of earth, "it's true an' that's jus' what she is,--the Angel of this Tenement, an', as Norma says, you're free to come over and play with her, though there ain't many of you I'd say it to;" and with that the tall, gaunt Mary bearing the baby, followed Norma into the house and up the narrow, broken stairs, and along the dark halls past door after door closed upon its story of squalor and poverty, until, at last, panting with the child's weight, she reached their own abode under the roof.
"Which," as Mary had been wont, in the past, to observe, "was about as near Heaven as the poor need look to get." But now, for some reason, these bitter speeches were growing less frequent on Mary Carew's lips since she opened her door to entertain an Angel.
CHAPTER IV.
THE ANGEL BECOMES A FAIRY.
July passed, and in August, the heat in the room beneath the roof set the air to shimmering like a veil before the open window, and Mary Carew, gasping, found it harder and harder to make that extra pair of jean pantaloons a day. And, as though the manager at the Garden Opera House had divined that Miss Bonkowski had left another birthday behind her, like milestones along the way, that lady's salary received a cut on the first day of August.
At best, the united incomes of the two made but a meagre sum, and there was nothing for it