The incident is not precisely idyllic. A certain Joe—Giuseppe Gonfarone; ætat. 14—whose father peddled fruit and vegetables, had recently come into the neighborhood; a black-curled, brown-eyed little devil, already far too wise in the manifold unseemliness of this sad old planet. Joe was strong, stocky, aggressive, and soon posed as something of a bully among the younger boys along Birch Street. Within less than a month he had infected the minds of many with a new and rich vocabulary of oaths and smutty words. Joe was not of the unconsciously foul-mouthed; he relished his depravity. In fact, youngster as he was, Joe had in him the makings of that slimiest product of our cities—the street pimp, or cadet.
It was one fine spring day, three years or so before I met Susan in the Eureka Garage, that Joe, with a group of Birch Street boys, was playing marbles for keeps, just at the bottom of the long incline which carries Birch Street down to the swamp land and general dump at the base of East Rock. Susan was returning home from Orange Street, after bearing her father his full dinner pail, and as she came up to the boys she halted on one foot, using the toe of her free foot meanwhile to scratch mosquito bites upward along her supporting shin.
"H'lo, Susan!" called Jimmy Kane, with his perfunctory good nature. "What's bitin' you?"
Then it was his turn to knuckle-down. Susan, still balanced cranelike, watched him eager-eyed, and was so delighted when he knocked a fine fat reeler of Joe's out of the ring, jumping up with a yell of triumph to pocket it, that she too gave a shrill cheer: "Oh, goody! I knew you'd win!"
The note of ecstasy in her tone infuriated Joe. "Say!" he shrieked. "You getta hell outta here!"
Susan's smile vanished; her white, even teeth—she had all her front ones, she tells me; she was ten—clicked audibly together.
"It's no business of yours!" she retorted.
"You're right; it ain't!" This from Jimmy, still in high good humor. "You stay here if you want. You're as good as him!"
"Who's as good as me?"
"She is!"