Ristofalo offered to take them at a dollar if he might wash and sort them under the dealer’s hydrant, which could be heard running in the back yard. The offer would have been rejected with rude scorn but for one thing: it was spoken in Italian. The man looked at him with pleased surprise, and made the concession. The porter of the store, in a red worsted cap, had drawn near. Ristofalo bade him roll the barrel on its chine to the rear and stand it by the hydrant.
“I will come back pretty soon,” he said, in Italian, and went away.
By and by he returned, bringing with him two swarthy, heavy-set, little Sicilian lads, each with his inevitable basket and some clean rags. A smile and gesture to the store-keeper, a word to the boys, and in a moment the barrel was upturned, and the pair were washing, wiping, and sorting the sound and unsound apples at the hydrant.
Ristofalo stood a moment in the entrance of the store. The question now was where to get a dollar. Richling passed, looked in, seemed to hesitate, went on, turned, and passed again, the other way. Ristofalo saw him all the time and recognized him at once, but appeared not to observe him.
“He will do,” thought the Italian. “Be back few minute’,” he said, glancing behind him.
“Or-r righ’,” said the store-keeper, with a hand-wave of good-natured confidence. He recognized Mr. Raphael Ristofalo’s species.
The Italian walked up across Poydras street, saw Richling stop and look at the machinery, approached, and touched him on the shoulder.
On parting with him he did not return to the store where he had left the apples. He walked up Tchoupitoulas street about a mile, and where St. Thomas street branches acutely from it, in a squalid district full of the poorest Irish, stopped at a dirty fruit-stand and spoke in Spanish to its Catalan proprietor. Half an hour later twenty-five cents had changed hands, the Catalan’s fruit shelves were bright with small pyramids—sound side foremost—of Ristofalo’s second grade of apples, the Sicilian had Richling’s dollar, and the Italian was gone with his boys and his better grade of fruit. Also, a grocer had sold some sugar, and a druggist a little paper of some harmless confectioner’s dye.
Down behind the French market, in a short, obscure street that runs from Ursulines to Barracks street, and is named in honor of Albert Gallatin, are some old buildings of three or four stories’ height, rented, in John Richling’s day, to a class of persons who got their livelihood by sub-letting the rooms, and parts of rooms, to the wretchedest poor of New Orleans,—organ-grinders, chimney-sweeps, professional beggars, street musicians, lemon-peddlers, rag-pickers, with all the yet dirtier herd that live by hook and crook in the streets or under the wharves; a room with a bed and stove, a room without, a half-room with or without ditto, a quarter-room with or without a blanket or quilt, and with only a chalk-mark on the floor instead of a partition. Into one of these went Mr. Raphael Ristofalo, the two boys, and the apples. Whose assistance or indulgence, if any, he secured in there is not recorded; but when, late in the afternoon, the Italian issued thence—the boys, meanwhile, had been coming and going—an unusual luxury had been offered the roustabouts and idlers of the steam-boat landings, and many had bought and eaten freely of the very small, round, shiny, sugary, and artificially crimson roasted apples, with neatly whittled white-pine stems to poise them on as they were lifted to the consumer’s watering teeth. When, the next morning Richling laughed at the story, the Italian drew out two dollars and a half, and began to take from it a dollar.
“But you have last night’s lodging and so forth yet to pay for.”