“COCKY.”
CHAPTER I.
THE MAGIC HUT.
An outcast in a great city. Half-clad, half-starved, kicked and cuffed, and sworn at, as if he were no better than a mongrel cur, wretched Jack Cochrane felt that he was a useless unit in the world.
Jack was a foundling, God help him! First one and then another had taken him in hand, to rear him in the way he should go and make a decent member of society of him; but the charitable intentions of his godfathers and godmothers had evidently failed, for here he stood on this cold winter’s night, a full-grown youth, utterly unlettered, shivering in the keen wind, like a puppy in a wet sack.
To most of the young ragamuffins of his class he was known by the nickname of “Cocky,” and while he stood beneath a lamp-post, thinking how [[343]]nice and comfortable it would be to tumble into a warm bed, half a dozen city waifs like himself came roystering by.
“Hello, Cocky! Where’r you going to doss to-night? Biler, or gas-pipe? Don’t you go on the wharf—there’s two coppers waitin’ there. Wouldn’t a saveloy hot or a tater go down slick, eh? So-long! Cocky, old man!” and the squad of shoeless young vagabonds went laughing on their way.
“I must try and get in and have a snooze somewhere,” muttered the lad, blowing on his finger-tips to warm them. “There’s the railway—I wonder if I could find a truck with a tarpaulin on it? I will try.”
The idea is acted on at once. Cocky soon finds a line of trucks covered well from the weather, into one of which he quietly creeps, and finding it snug and warm is soon fast asleep.