“They sandbagged the woman on our top floor the night after Buster was killed.”
Amazed I turned and stared at the old tinker.
“You don’t mean the old Italian mother, who was working and saving to get money to return to Italy and die in her old home?” I finally questioned.
The tinker nodded. He was scraping the bottom of a pot preparatory to applying solder.
“They most worked theyselves to death, her and her daughter. Done piece-work nights and Sundays,” he told me, glancing up from his task of blowing on the charcoal in his little bucket with his little bellows. “The mother was goin’ back, had drawed their savin’ out the bank that day, an’ was goin’ down the next mornin’ to pay for her passage and get the balance of her money changed. She stopped in on her way up to say a few words to Julie—she always done that evenin’s comin’ in from work. ’Bout half an hour later her daughter found her in the hall outside their door. She’d been knocked senseless and her clothes ’most tore off looking for her money.”
There was a short silence and the old man began to tinker with the pot.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“On the Island.” The solder being melted he applied it to the hole in the bottom of the pot. “They kept her in Bellevue till they seen there wasn’t no chance of curin’ her. You see, it’s her brain,” he explained as he wiped his hands on his bedticking apron. “Some of it oozed out where the sand-bag broke her skull. It stands to reason she never can have right good sense again, and one side of her’s paralyzed worse than Julie’s.”
Tommaso was a brindle and white mongrel. Though he had never rescued a woman, a baby, or any other human, so far as I learned, from a violent death, I number him first among the dog heroes of my district. His master and mistress, Mr. and Mrs. Pasquali Dominic, were both natives of Italy. Meeting for the first time in New York they were married at the City Hall August 9, 1898. Twenty years, one week, and five days after this happy event I paid my first call on Tommaso.
Crouched in one corner of the family’s basement kitchen-living-room-bedroom, he was trying not to watch too greedily the spoonfuls of thin porridge and the hunks of Italian bread being taken in alternate swallows by the five youngest of Mr. and Mrs. Dominic’s eighteen children. Being a gentleman as well as a hero he rose on my entrance.