IV
Just where Broadway crosses Sixth Avenue at Thirty-third Street is to be found a dingy, triangular little park plot in which a few gas-stunted, smoke-stained trees make a brave attempt to keep alive. On two sides of the triangle surface-cars whirl restlessly, while overhead the elevated trains rattle and shriek. This part of the metropolis knows little difference between day and night, for the cars never cease, the arc-lights blaze from dusk until dawn and the pavements are never wholly empty.
Locally the section is sometimes called "the Cabman's Graveyard." During any hour of the twenty-four you may find waiting along the curb a line of public carriages. By day you will sometimes see smartly kept hansoms, well-groomed horses, and drivers in neat livery.
But at night the character of the line changes. The carriages are mostly one-horse closed cabs, rickety as to wheels, with torn and faded cushions, license numbers obscured by various devices and rate-cards always missing. The horses are dilapidated, too; and the drivers, whom you will generally find nodding on the box or sound asleep inside their cabs, harmonize with their rigs.
These are the Nighthawkers of the Tenderloin. The name is not an assuring one, but it is suspected that it has been aptly given.
One bleak midnight in late November a cab of this description waited in the lee of the elevated stairs. The cab itself was weather-beaten, scratched, and battered. The driver, who sat half inside and half outside the vehicle, with his feet on the sidewalk and his back propped against the seat-cushion, puffed a short pipe and watched with indolent but discriminating eye those who passed. He wore a coachman's coat of faded green which seemed to have acquired a stain for every button it had lost. On his head sat jauntily a rusty beaver and his face, especially the nose, was of a rich crimson hue.
The horse, that seemed to lean on rather than stand in the patched shafts, showed many well-defined points and but few curves. His thin neck was ewed, there were deep hollows over the eyes, the number of his ribs was revealed with startling frankness and the sagging of one hind-quarter betrayed a bad leg. His head he held in spiritless fashion on a level with his knees. As if to add a note of irony, his tail had been docked to the regulation of absurd brevity and served only to tag him as one fallen from a more reputable state.
Suddenly, up and across the intersecting thoroughfares, with a sharp clatter of hoofs, rolled a smart closed brougham. The dispirited bobtail looked up as a well-mated pair pranced past. Perhaps he noted their sleek quarters, the glittering trappings on their backs and their gingery action. As he dropped his head again something very like a sigh escaped him. It might have been regret, perhaps it was only a touch of influenza.
The driver, too, saw the turnout and gazed after it. But he did not sigh. He puffed away at his pipe as if entirely satisfied with his lot. He was still watching the brougham when a surface-car came gliding swiftly around a curve. There was a smash of splintering wood and breaking glass. The car had struck the brougham a battering-ram blow, crushing a rear wheel and snapping the steel axle at the hub.
From somewhere or other a crowd of curious persons appeared and circled about to watch while the driver held the plunging horses and the footman hauled from the overturned carriage a man and a woman in evening dress. The couple seemed unhurt and, although somewhat rumpled as to attire, remarkably unconcerned.
"Keb, sir! Have a keb, sir?"
The Nighthawker was on the scene, like a longshore wrecker, and waving an inviting arm toward his shabby vehicle.
The man coolly restored to shape his misused opera hat, adjusted his necktie, whispered some orders to his coachman and then asked of the Nighthawker: "Where's your carriage, my man?"
Eagerly the green-coated cabby led the way until the rescued couple stood before it. The woman inspected the battered vehicle doubtfully before stepping inside. The man eyed the sorry nag for a moment and then said, with a laugh: "Good frame you have there; got the parts all numbered?"
But the Nighthawker was not sensitive. The intimation that his horse might fall apart he answered only with a good-natured chuckle and asked: "Where shall it be; home, sir?"
"Why, yes, drive us to number——"
"Oh, we know the house well enough, sir, Bonfire and me."
"Bonfire! Bonfire, did you say?" Incredulously the fare looked first at the horse and then at the driver. "Why, 'pon my word, it's old Dan! And this relic in the shafts is Bonfire, is it?"
"It's him, sir; leastways, all there's left of him."
"Well, I'll be hanged! Kitty! Kitty!" he shouted into the cab where my lady was nervously pulling her skirts closer about her and sniffing the tobacco-laden atmosphere with evident disapproval. "Here's Dan, our old coachman."
"Really?" was the unenthusiastic reply from the cab.
"Yes, and he's driving Bonfire. You remember Bonfire, the hackney I bought for you at the Garden the year we were married."
"Indeed? Why, how odd? But do come in, Jerry, and let's get on home. I'm so-o-o-o tired."
Mr. Jerry stifled his sentiment and shut the cab-door with a bang. Dan pulled Bonfire's head into position and lightly laid the whip over the all too obvious ribs. Bonfire, his head bobbing ludicrously on his thin neck and his stubby tail keeping time at the other end of him, moved uncertainly up the avenue at a jerky hobble.
And there let us leave him. Poor old Bonfire! Bred to win a ribbon at the Garden—ended as the drudge of a Tenderloin Nighthawker.