<h2 id="c22">XXII</h2>
<p>Three of the busiest portions of New
York, varying with the various hours of
the day, may safely be said to lie in that
neighborhood where Nassau Street debouches
into Park Row, and also near that point where
Twenty-third Street intercepts Fourth Avenue,
and still again not far from where Broadway
and Fifth Avenue meet at the southwest
corner of Madison Square.</p>
<p>About these three points, at certain hours
of the day and on certain days of the week,
an observant stranger might have noticed the
strangely grotesque figure of an old cement
seller. So often had this old street-peddler
duly appeared at his stand, from month to
month, that the hurrying public seemed to
have become inured to the grotesqueness of his
appearance. Seldom, indeed, did a face turn
to inspect him as he blinked out at the lighted
street like a Pribiloff seal blinking into an
Arctic sun. Yet it was only by a second or
even a third glance that the more inquisitive
might have detected anything arresting in that
forlornly ruminative figure with the pendulous
and withered throat and cheek-flaps.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_290">[290]</div>
<p>To the casual observer he was merely a picturesque
old street-peddler, standing like a
time-stained statue beside a carefully arrayed
exhibit of his wares. This exhibit, which invariably
proved more interesting than his own
person, consisted of a frame of gas-piping in
the form of an inverted U. From the top bar
of this iron frame swung two heavy pieces of
leather cemented together. Next to this coalesced
leather dangled a large Z made up of
three pieces of plate glass stuck together at
the ends, and amply demonstrating the adhesive
power of the cementing mixture to be
purchased there.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_291">[291]</div>
<p>Next to the glass Z again were two rows
of chipped and serrated plates and saucers,
plates and saucers of all kinds and colors, with
holes drilled in their edges, and held together
like a suspended chain-gang by small brass
links. At some time in its career each one of
these cups and saucers had been broken across
or even shattered into fragments. Later, it
had been ingeniously and patiently glued together.
And there it and its valiant brothers
in misfortune swung together in a double row,
with a cobblestone dangling from the bottom
plate, reminding the passing world of remedial
beneficences it might too readily forget,
attesting to the fact that life’s worst fractures
might in some way still be made whole.</p>
<p>Yet so impassively, so stolidly statuesque,
did this figure stand beside the gas-pipe that
to all intents he might have been cemented to
the pavement with his own glue. He seldom
moved, once his frame had been set up and his
wares laid out. When he did move it was
only to re-awaken the equally plethoric motion
of his slowly oscillating links of cemented
glass and chinaware. Sometimes, it is true,
he disposed of a phial of his cement, producing
his bottle and receiving payment with the absorbed
impassivity of an automaton.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_292">[292]</div>
<p>Huge as his figure must once have been, it
now seemed, like his gibbeted plates, all battered
and chipped and over-written with the
marks of time. Like his plates, too, he carried
some valiant sense of being still intact,
still stubbornly united, still oblivious of every
old-time fracture, still bound up into personal
compactness by some power which defied the
blows of destiny.</p>
<p>In all seasons, winter and summer, apparently,
he wore a long and loose-fitting overcoat.
This overcoat must once have been
black, but it had faded to a green so conspicuous
that it made him seem like a bronze
figure touched with the mellowing <i>patina</i> of
time.</p>
<p>It was in the incredibly voluminous pockets
of this overcoat that the old peddler carried
his stock in trade, paper-wrapped bottles of
different sizes, and the nickels and dimes and
quarters of his daily trafficking. And as the
streams of life purled past him, like water past
a stone, he seemed to ask nothing of the world
on which he looked out with such deep-set and
impassive eyes. He seemed content with his
lot. He seemed to have achieved a Nirvana-like
indifferency towards all his kind.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_293">[293]</div>
<p>Yet there were times, as he waited beside
his stand, as lethargic as a lobster in a fish-peddler’s
window, when his flaccid, exploring
fingers dug deeper into one of those capacious
side-pockets and there came in contact with
two oddly shaped wristlets of polished steel.
At such times his intent eyes would film, as
the eyes of a caged eagle sometimes do.
Sometimes, too, he would smile with the half-pensive
Castilian smile of an uncouth and
corpulent Cervantes.</p>
<p>But as a rule his face was expressionless.
About the entire moss-green figure seemed
something faded and futile, like a street-lamp
left burning after sunrise. At other times, as
the patrolman on the beat sauntered by in his
authoritative blue stippled with its metal buttons,
the old peddler’s watching eyes would
wander wistfully after the nonchalant figure.
At such times a meditative and melancholy intentness
would fix itself on the faded old face,
and the stooping old shoulders would even unconsciously
heave with a sigh.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_294">[294]</div>
<p>As a rule, however, the great green-clad
figure with its fringe of white hair—the fringe
that stood blithely out from the faded hat
brim like the halo of some medieval saint on
a missal—did not permit his gaze to wander so
far afield.</p>
<p>For, idle as that figure seemed, the brain
behind it was forever active, forever vigilant
and alert. The deep-set eyes under their lids
that hung as loose as old parchment were always
fixed on the life that flowed past them.
No face, as those eyes opened and closed like
the gills of a dying fish, escaped their inspection.
Every man who came within their range
of vision was duly examined and adjudicated.
Every human atom of that forever ebbing
and flowing tide of life had to pass through
an invisible screen of inspection, had in some
intangible way to justify itself as it proceeded
on its unknown movement towards an unknown
end. And on the loose-skinned and
haggard face, had it been studied closely
enough, could have been seen a vague and
wistful note of expectancy, a guarded and
muffled sense of anticipation.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_295">[295]</div>
<p>Yet to-day, as on all other days, nobody
stopped to study the old cement-seller’s face.
The pink-cheeked young patrolman, swinging
back on his beat, tattooed with his ash night-stick
on the gas-pipe frame and peered indifferently
down at the battered and gibbeted
crockery.</p>
<p>“Hello, Batty,” he said as he set the exhibit
oscillating with a push of the knee. “How’s
business?”</p>
<p>“Pretty good,” answered the patient and
guttural voice. But the eyes that seemed as
calm as a cow’s eyes did not look at the patrolman
as he spoke.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_296">[296]</div>
<p>He had nothing to fear. He knew that he
had his license. He knew that under the
faded green of his overcoat was an oval-shaped
street-peddler’s badge. He also knew, which
the patrolman did not, that under the lapel
of his inner coat was a badge of another shape
and design, the badge which season by season
the indulgent new head of the Detective Bureau
extended to him with his further privilege
of a special officer’s license. For this empty
honor “Batty” Blake—for as “Batty” he was
known to nearly all the cities of America—did
an occasional bit of “stooling” for the Central
Office, a tip as to a stray yeggman’s return,
a hint as to a “peterman’s” activities in
the shopping crowds, a whisper that a till tapper
had failed to respect the Department’s
dead-lines.</p>
<p>Yet nobody took Batty Blake seriously. It
was said, indeed, that once, in the old régime,
he had been a big man in the Department.
But that Department had known many
changes, and where life is unduly active, memory
is apt to be unduly short.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_297">[297]</div>
<p>The patrolman tapping on the gas-pipe arch
with his idle night-stick merely knew that
Batty was placid and inoffensive, that he never
obstructed traffic and always carried a license-badge.
He knew that in damp weather Batty
limped and confessed that his leg pained him
a bit, from an old hurt he’d had in the East.
And he had heard somewhere that Batty was
a sort of Wandering Jew, patroling the whole
length of the continent with his broken plates
and his gas-pipe frame and his glue-bottles,
migrating restlessly from city to city, striking
out as far west as San Francisco, swinging
round by Denver and New Orleans and then
working his way northward again up to St.
Louis and Chicago and Pittsburgh.</p>
<p>Remembering these things the idle young
“flatty” turned and looked at the green-coated
and sunken-shouldered figure, touched into
some rough pity by the wordless pathos of an
existence which seemed without aim or reason.</p>
<p>“Batty, how long’re yuh going to peddle
glue, anyway?” he suddenly asked.</p>
<p>The glue-peddler, watching the crowds that
drifted by him, did not answer. He did not
even look about at his interrogator.</p>
<p>“D’ yuh <i>have</i> to do this?” asked the wide-shouldered
youth in uniform.</p>
<p>“No,” was the peddler’s mild yet guttural
response.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_298">[298]</div>
<p>The other prodded with his night-stick
against the capacious overcoat pockets. Then
he laughed.</p>
<p>“I’ll bet yuh’ve got about forty dollars
stowed away in there,” he mocked. “Yuh
have now, haven’t yuh?”</p>
<p>“I don’ know!” listlessly answered the
sunken-shouldered figure.</p>
<p>“Then what’re yuh sellin’ this stuff for, if
it ain’t for money?” persisted the vaguely
piqued youth.</p>
<p>“I don’ know!” was the apathetic answer.</p>
<p>“Then who does?” inquired the indolent
young officer, as he stood humming and rocking
on his heels and swinging his stick by its
wrist-thong.</p>
<p>The man known as Batty may or may not
have been about to answer him. His lips
moved, but no sound came from them. His
attention, apparently, was suddenly directed
elsewhere. For approaching him from the
east his eyes had made out the familiar figure
of old McCooey, the oldest plain-clothes man
who still came out from Headquarters to
“pound the pavement.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_299">[299]</div>
<p>And at almost the same time, approaching
him from the west, he had caught sight of another
figure.</p>
<p>It was that of a dapper and thin-faced man
who might have been anywhere from forty to
sixty years of age. He walked, however, with
a quick and nervous step. Yet the most remarkable
thing about him seemed to be his
eyes. They were wide-set and protuberant,
like a bird’s, as though years of being hunted
had equipped him with the animal-like faculty
of determining without actually looking back
just who might be following him.</p>
<p>Those alert and wide-set eyes, in fact, must
have sighted McCooey at the same time that
he fell under the vision of the old cement
seller. For the dapper figure wheeled quietly
and quickly about and stooped down at the
very side of the humming patrolman. He
stooped and examined one of the peddler’s
many-fractured china plates. He squinted
down at it as though it were a thing of intense
interest to him.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_300">[300]</div>
<p>As he stooped there the humming patrolman
was the witness of a remarkable and inexplicable
occurrence. From the throat of the huge-shouldered
peddler, not two paces away from
him, he heard come a hoarse and brutish cry,
a cry strangely like the bawl and groan of a
branded range-cow. At the same moment the
gigantic green-draped figure exploded into
sudden activity. He seemed to catapult out
at the stooping dapper figure, bearing it to the
sidewalk with the sheer weight of his unprovoked
assault.</p>
<p>There the struggle continued. There the
two strangely diverse bodies twisted and
panted and writhed. There the startlingly
agile dapper figure struggled to throw off his
captor. The arch of gas-pipe went over.
Glue-bottles showered amid the shattered
glass and crockery. But that once placid-eyed
old cement seller stuck to the unoffending
man he had so promptly and so gratuitously
attacked, stuck to him as though he had
been glued there with his own cement. And
before the patrolman could tug the combatants
apart, or even wedge an arm into the fight,
the exulting green-coated figure had his
enemy on his back along the curb, and, reaching
down into his capacious pocket, drew out
two oddly shaped steel wristlets. Forcing up
his captive’s arm, he promptly snapped one
steel wring on his own wrist, and one on the
wrist of the still prostrate man.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_301">[301]</div>
<p>“What’re yuh tryin’ to do?” demanded the
amazed officer, still tugging at the great figure
holding down the smaller man. In the encounter
between those two embattled enemies
had lurked an intensity of passion which he
could not understand, which seemed strangely
akin to insanity itself.</p>
<p>It was only when McCooey pushed his way
in through the crowd and put a hand on his
shoulder that the old cement seller slowly rose
to his feet. He was still panting and blowing.
But as he lifted his face up to the sky
his body rumbled with a Jove-like sound that
was not altogether a cough of lungs overtaxed
nor altogether a laugh of triumph.</p>
<p>“I got him!” he gasped.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_302">[302]</div>
<p>About his once placid old eyes, which the
hardened tear-ducts no longer seemed able to
drain of their moisture, was a look of exultation
that made the gathering street-crowd take
him for a panhandler gone mad with hunger.</p>
<p>“Yuh got <i>who</i>?” cried the indignant young
officer, wheeling the bigger man about on his
feet. As the cement seller, responding to that
tug, pivoted about, it was noticeable that the
man to whom his wrist was locked by the band
of steel duly duplicated the movement. He
moved when the other moved; he drew aside
when the other drew aside, as though they were
now two parts of one organism.</p>
<p>“I got him!” calmly repeated the old street-peddler.</p>
<p>“Yuh got <i>who</i>?” demanded the still puzzled
young patrolman, oblivious of the quiescent
light in the bewildered eyes of McCooey, close
beside him.</p>
<p>“Binhart!” answered Never-Fail Blake,
with a sob. “<i>I’ve got Binhart!</i>”</p>
<p class="tbcenter"><span class="small">THE END</span></p>
<h2>Transcriber’s Notes</h2>
<ul><li>Preserved the copyright notice from the printed edition, although this book is in the public domain in the country of publication.</li>
<li>Silently corrected a few typos (but left nonstandard spelling and dialect as is).</li>
<li>Renumbered the chapter numbers (there were two chapters numbered V).</li>
<li>Silently corrected two slight errors related to New York City place names.</li>
<li>In the text versions, delimited text in italics by _underscores_.</li></ul>
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