She had reached in the window and taken from a very small collection of coins one cent. Her husband witnessed the act of rash extravagance without even a look of reproach, which argued that the crisis in the bank’s affairs had driven him to an unwonted mood. Presently Biddy bounded into the room bearing a thin watermelon rind on which scarcely a trace of the red remained. Bridget took it, and while her offspring stood as though used to the treatment, rubbed it over her face with loving care, thus affirming the Neapolitan tenet that the watermelon is thrice blessed among fruits, for with it one eats, drinks, and washes the face. The maternal apron applied as a towel, Biddy broke away and made for Paradise Park, where she was soon romping with other tangle-haired youngsters around the band stand.
After a brief silence, during which Pat had shot by the door on the roller skate, Signor Tomato remarked, jerking his thumb toward the headless Jack Tar:
“To-day I am feel lik-a him—no head, no northeen. For God sague, me, I’m go crezzy.”
“Bad luck to the hoodoo, annyhow,” said Bridget, shaking her red fist at the mutilated relic of a once noble though wooden manhood. “It’s the Jonah iv a sailor y’are iver since we bought ye from the Dootchman, sorra the day. Phat am I at all at all, that I didn’t take the axe t’ye long ago? Be the powers, it’s not too late yit, and I’ll do it this minute. Betther the day betther the deed, for there’s not a shtick in the house agin the fire for the dinner soup.”
In rough-and-tumble wrestling fashion she seized the sailor, laid him low, and dragged him over the curb to the roadway. Then she bustled into the bank, and quickly reappeared armed with a rusty axe of long handle. And while Signor Tomato looked on, his face a picture of rising doubt and fluttering hope, and passing women set down loaded baskets from their heads to gaze in voluble wonder, Bridget brought the Jack Tar’s long-suffering career to an ignoble end.
“Mike, Pat, Biddy!” she cried, resting on the axe when the task was finished. “Come you here and carry in the wood.”
She had left no part of the structure intact save the platform and wheels. These she kept for Pat to play with. “It’ll do him for a wagon,” she reflected; “then Mike can have the shkate all to himsilf.”
The banker’s spirit was utterly broken, else he would never have permitted without verbal protest at least this outrage upon his old silent partner.
“Ees-a one old friend no more,” he mused sadly, looking at his wife and shaking his head. “I’m don’ know eef-a you do right.” Then in his native patter he quoted the Neapolitan saw: “Who breaks pays, but the fragments are his.”
