This society may have been as helpless in the matter as the one I represented, but I didn’t know of any other threat to make. It had the desired effect.
Hardly a day passed without at least one such appeal being made to me. It almost seemed that people had the idea that heartless landlords, dead horses, and deader cats were my specialty.
One woman trailed me three successive mornings in a house-to-house search from East Seventy-first Street to East Seventy-ninth and Exterior Streets. The first day she found me I was sitting on the river-wall in the shade of a derrick, eating my lunch—two Georgia peaches.
“It’s just a chance I seen you,” she called, as she crossed from the corner. “I told my daughter if I found you I know’d you’d do it, and I set out to find you.” Halting in front of me she wiped the streaming perspiration from her purple and crimson blotched face.
“Sit down and tell me about it,” I invited, making room for her in the scanty shade of the derrick. Though I had no recollection of her face, I knew she belonged in some one of the hundreds of homes that I had visited during the past few days.
“My grandbaby’s got the browncreeters,” she told me, as taking her seat at my side, she began to fan her face with her apron.
“Bronchitis is pretty serious for a young baby,” I admitted; not knowing in what other way I could be of use to her I asked: “Do you want me to have it taken to Bellevue?”
She shook her head. “It’s the dead horse, corner of Avenue A. You seen it the day you was at my daughter’s about her dog, a French poodle.”
If she had not mentioned the dead horse I certainly would not have remembered her daughter’s dog. All white woolly dogs in the tenements, and about twenty-five per cent are white and woolly, are dignified by the name of French poodle. I did remember the dead horse.
“I promised your daughter to telephone the Health Department about that horse, and I did so,” I replied, a bit nettled by her having chased me down after I had explained to her daughter and numerous others in the vicinity of that dead horse that I was not a city employee, had no authority to get dead animals moved.