“But we’re goin’ to find grandpa, Bo’sn, an’ we don’t mind a thing else. Don’t take so very long to get to that old ‘Harbor,’ an’ maybe he might have a bite o’ somethin’ saved up ’at he could give us, though we don’t neither of us want to eat ’fore we get him back, do we, doggie?” cried the child as they sped along and trying not to notice that empty feeling in her stomach.
But they had gone no further than the end of the Lane before they collided with Nick, the parson, just entering it. He had finished his morning’s sale of papers and was feeling hungry for his own breakfast and, as Take-a-Stitch ran against him, demanded rather angrily, “What you mean, Goober Glory, knockin’ a feller down that way?”
“O Nick! Have you seen grandpa?”
“Seen the cap’n? How should I? Ain’t this his time o’ workin’ on his frames?”
Glory swiftly told her trouble and Nick’s face clouded in sympathy. Finally he suggested, “They was a old blind feller got run over on Broadway yest’day. Likely ’twas him an’ that’s why. ’Twas in the paper all right, ’cause I heard a man say how’t somethin’ must be done to stop such accidentses. Didn’t hear no name but, ’course, ’twas the cap’n. Posy Jane always thought he’d get killed, runnin’ round loose, like he did, without nobody but a dog takin’ care.”
Glory had clutched Nick’s shoulder and was now shaking him with what little strength seemed left to her after hearing his dreadful words. As soon as she could recover from that queer feeling in her throat, and was able to speak, she indignantly denied the possibility of this terrible thing being true.
“’Tis no such thing, Nick Dodd, an’ you know it! Wasn’t I there, right alongside, when’t happened? Wasn’t I a-listenin’ to them very chimes a-ringin’ what he listens to every time he gets a chanst? Don’t you s’pose I’d know my own grandpa when I saw him? Huh!”
“Did–you see him, Glory Beck? How’d come them amberlance fellers let a kid like you get nigh enough to see a thing? Hey?”
Glory gasped as the remembrance came that she had not really seen the injured man but that the slight glimpse of his clothing and his white hair had been, indeed, very like her grandfather’s. Still, this awful thing could not, should not be true! Better far that dreaded place, Snug Harbor, where, at least, he would be alive and well cared for.
“Oh, I got nigh. I got nigh enough to get knocked down my own self, an’ be picked up by one them ‘finest’ p’licemens, what marches on Broadway. He shook me fit to beat an’ set me on the sidewalk an’ scolded me hard, but I didn’t care, ’cause I was so glad to keep alive an’ not be tooken off to a hospital, like that old man was. Huh! You needn’t go thinkin’ nor sayin’ that was Grandpa Simon Beck, ’cause I know better. I shan’t have it that ’twas, so there.”