Adams turned again to the window.
The cab was passing through a residence district now. He noted with a shifting, vague interest, the houses—big, shapeless for the most part, and set far back in broad yards. The lights in the lower stories glared yellow like the earth-close eyes of crouching monsters.
Suddenly Adams pulled himself together. He began to experience a livelier interest in the dark picture of the street, with its broad curbs, its iron fences, dark hedges, and wide yards. He pressed his face against the window in the cab door, and now and again twisted his neck to gaze as far back down the street as the swift motion of the vehicle would permit.
He remembered definitely, vividly, certain landmarks of his young boyhood, as he was whirled on, noiselessly, save for the rythmic clackety-clack of the horse's hoofs on the echoing asphalt. There was the house from the side yard of which he had once, as a tiny lad, stolen a great armful of roses. There, again, was the house with the smoke tree near the porch behind which Pauline, his little sister, and he had once hidden until the policeman passed, indolently swinging his night stick.
Adams smiled at the recollection.
The cab came opposite a tall apartment house at the junction of a cross-town car line. On the ground now occupied by the ungainly, rambling pile of stone, he remembered vividly, had stood, when he was a very small boy—hardly big enough to push his cart—a little shack occupied by an old cobbler, deserted in his age by a son who had robbed him. Very many were the hours he had spent in that little shop. He recalled certain of those hours with a momentary pang of sadness. The cobbler had been a soldier in Poland, in his time, and was wont to tell great stories of his own valor, to which the yellow-headed lad, all forgetful of his mission and his cart, had listened wide-eyed and open-mouthed. The memory came swift and certain and distinct in detail and in the richness of it Adams shrank from the ugly stone pile in passing, as though it were a horrid thing thus to thrust itself upon a young man's memory of his little boyhood.
As he dreamed thus the cab turned a corner, suddenly. The rich residential thoroughfare vanished like the palace in the pantomime, and Adams, his face still close to the glass, saw a row of little, squat, mean houses, set regularly behind low white picket fences. Only here and there a light shone from small, square windows. The street seemed totally deserted, save for a single dog that he saw crawl under one of the low latched gates and vanish behind a house that was like all the others in the little squalid street. And as he noted these things, the cab pulled up before such another house, and, mechanically, he passed his hand over his forehead, as a child does when awakened.
A brief parley ensued with the burly driver of the cab, comical in his bristling fur cape.
"Kin yeh git 'im out?" he asked.
"Yes."