From Place to Place

by Irvin S. Cobb

Now it is a part of the business of newspaper men to put two and two together and get four. Months later, recalling what the governor had said to the Albany correspondents, divers city editors with the aid of their bright young staff men did put two and two together and they got a story. It was a peach of a bird of a gem of a story that they got on the day a transport nosed up the harbour bearing what was left of one of the infantry regiments of the praiseworthy Metropolitan Division.

Even in those days of regardless receptions for home-arriving troops it did not often happen that a secretary to the governor and an assistant from the office of the district attorney went down the bay on the same tug to meet the same returning soldier—and he a private soldier at that. Each of these gentlemen had put on his long-tailed coat and his two-quart hat for the gladsome occasion; each of them carried a document for personal presentation to this private soldier.

And the sum total of these documents was: Firstly, to the full legal effect that a certain indictment of long standing was now by due processes of law forever and eternally quashed; and secondly, that the governor had seen fit to remove all disabilities against a certain individual, thereby restoring the person named to all the rights, boons, benefits and privileges of citizenship; and thirdly, that in accordance with a prior and privy design, now fully carried out, the recipient of these documents had official guaranty, stamped, sealed and delivered, that when he set foot on the soil of these United States he would do so without cloud upon his title as a sovereign voter, without blemish on his name and without fear of prosecution in his heart. And the upshot of it all was that the story was more than a peach; it was a pippin. The rehabilitation of Private Pasquale Gallino, sometime known as Stretchy Gorman, gangster, and more latterly still as P. Goodman, U. S. A., A. E. F., was celebrated to the extent of I don't know how many gallons of printer's ink.

Having landed in driblets and having been reassembled in camp as a whole, the division presently paraded, which made another story deemed worthy of columns upon columns in print. Our duty here, though, is not to undertake a description of that parade, for such was competently done on that fine day when the crowd that turned out was the largest crowd which that city of crowds, New York, had seen since the day when the crowding Dutchmen crowded the Indians off the shortly-to-be-crowded island of Manhattan.

Those who followed the daily chronicles of daily events saw then, through the eyes of gifted scribes, how Fifth Avenue was turned into a four-mile stretch of prancing, dancing glory; and how the outpouring millions, in masses fluid as water and in strength irresistible as a flood, broke the police dams and made of roadway and sidewalks one great, roaring, human sluiceway; and how the khaki-clad ranks marched upon a carpet of the flowers and the fruit and the candy and the cigarettes and the cigars and the confetti and the paper ribbons that were thrown at them and about them. These things are a tale told and retold. For us the task is merely to narrate one small incident which occurred in a side street hard by Washington Square while the parade was forming.

Where he stood marking time in the front row of the honour men of his own regiment—there being forty-six of these honour men, all bearing upon their proudly outbulged bosoms bits of metal testifying to valorous deeds—First Sergeant Hyman Ginsburg, keeping eyes front upon the broad back of the colonel who would ride just in advance of the honour squad and speaking out of the side of his mouth, addressed a short, squat, dark man in private's uniform almost directly behind him at the end of the second file.

"Pal," he said, casting his voice over his shoulder, "did you happen to read in the paper this morning that the police commissioner—the new one, the one that was appointed while we were in France—would be in the reviewing stand to-day?"

"No, I didn't read it; but wot of it?" answered the person addressed.

"Nothing, only it reminded me of a promise I made you that night down at the Stuffed Owl when we met for the first time since we were kids together. Remember that promise, don't you?"

"Can't say I do."