"I wonder if Lem Wacker has sold the dog, too?" he reflected. "Poor Mrs. Wacker! I feel awfully sorry for her."
Bart walked rapidly back the way he had come. It was just a quarter of seven when he reached a half-street extending along and facing the railroad tracks for a single square.
The Sharp Corner was a second-class groggery and boarding house, patronized almost entirely by the poorest and most shiftless class of trackmen.
Its proprietor was one Silas Green, once a switchman, later a prize fighter, always a hard drinker, and latterly so crippled with rheumatism and liquor that he was just able to get about.
Bart went into the place to find its proprietor just opening up for the day. The dead, tainted air of the den made the young express agent almost faint. As it vividly contrasted with the sweet, garden scented atmosphere of home, he wondered how men could make it their haunt, and was sorry that even business had made it necessary for him to enter the place.
"Mr. Green," he said, approaching the bar, "I am looking for Lem Wacker. Can you tell me where I may find him?"
"Eh? oh, young Stirling, isn't it? Wacker? Why, yes, I know where he is."
He came out slowly from the obscurity of the bar, blinking his faded eyes.
Bart knew he would not be unfriendly. His father, one stormy night a few years previous, had picked up Green half frozen to death in a snowdrift, where he had fallen in a drunken stupor.
Every Christmas day since then, Green had regularly sent a jug of liquor to his father, with word by the messenger that it was for "the squarest man in Pleasantville, who had saved his life."