“If he buys a ticket for Greenport, I’ll grab him,” says I to myself.
I took a good look at him, wondering how much fight there was into him. He wasn’t a very big feller, and I was considered a perfect terror down in the fourth ward, so I wasn’t afraid.
“I’m good for two like him,” thinks I, and I pinned my shield on inside my coat, so as to show if a crowd tried to hustle me. But, gracious! you never know how things is going to come out.
We’d got pretty well over to the Howard House by this time, and right ahead, between him and the station, was a lot of empty freight-cars standing.
He struck around the cars on one side and me on the other. When I got onto the platform there wasn’t nothing of him to be seen.
Thunderation, wasn’t I mad!
“He’s given me the slip,” I thought. “He’s tumbled to my little racket,” and I ran around on the other side of the cars, thinking he must have dodged back.
But he wasn’t there. I couldn’t see nothing of him no where. I bet you I was just about the sickest fellow in East New York then.
Had he slipped into one of the freight cars?
I thought so, and I was just going to look when all of a sudden the train came thundering in.