CHAPTER VI
WHAT WAS BEHIND THE FALSE PARTITION
Long before eight o’clock, Willie Brown, no longer arrayed in overalls but dressed in his best, was at the place of rendezvous, at Bowling Green. Sheridan was not yet there. Willie knew something of the history of this tiny oval of grass, at the foot of Broadway, the longest street in the world. And now, while he was waiting for the Secret Service man he looked up that thoroughfare, which in ways other than mere length has no counterpart in the earth. He could not help thinking of the difference that three short centuries had made in its appearance.
Now he was looking up a thoroughfare so narrow that six wagons abreast filled it from curb to curb. Of course there were tiny side streets, near at hand, like Petticoat Lane, in which two teams could not pass each other. Indeed, one team practically occupied all that roadway. And there were scores of streets all about him, crooked, twisting little highways that originally were probably paths worn through the brush by the cattle of the early Dutch settlers. But Willie was facing up Broadway, the main artery of traffic for the great metropolis. And though this street would have been plenty wide enough for a country town, it was hopelessly inadequate for the great city.
For on either hand, as far as he could see, rose the hugest buildings in existence. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and even fifty stories, the various buildings towered aloft. More than one of the colossal sky-scrapers housed ten thousand workers—a number of people several times greater than the entire population of the town in which Willie lived. And yet Broadway here was no wider than Main Street in Central City. No wonder Broadway was so crowded, when building after building poured out its thousands upon thousands of workers into this one thoroughfare.
But all these majestic buildings, all these wondrous changes that had altered lower Manhattan from a forested rocky island to a magic city of cloud-touching structures, were not as remarkable as this tiny oval of grass in which Willie stood. The remarkable thing about this grass plot is that it is a grass plot. For three hundred years one change has followed hard upon the heels of another about Bowling Green. Yet Bowling Green is still Bowling Green, even as it was in the days of old Peter Stuyvesant. A little smaller it is no doubt. But it is still open and still softly carpeted with turf, even as it was when those early Dutch settlers played at bowls on its well cropped sward.
In imagination Willie could see them now, in their voluminous knee-length breeches, rolling their wooden balls over the grass. And the Custom-house that rose majestically across the street on the site of the old Dutch fort became in Willie’s eyes the old fort itself; with its great earthen walls so neglected by the placid Dutch that their roving swine rooted holes entirely through them.
As he gazed at the marble statue of an early, Dutch city father, within the little oval, he remembered that he had read that long before it had been erected, there stood in this same Bowling Green Park a leaden statue of George III, of England. And Willie recalled, too, that a crowd of patriots, during the Revolution, had fastened ropes to this statue, at a time when Washington was in sore need of ammunition, and had pulled it down and melted it, and cast the molten lead into bullets to teach that same George III a needed lesson. And that thought recalled to mind another occurrence of Revolutionary days that took place in this exact spot where he stood. The iron-picketed fence that surrounds Bowling Green was built in 1771, and each of the cast-iron posts bore on its summit a royal coat of arms or some other royal insignia, that the patriots did not like. And so, with hammers and axes, they knocked off these offending finials. Plainly did the rough-topped supports show where these offensive emblems had been broken away; and Willie had just started to examine the telltale marks, when a voice said, “Hello, youngster. I see you are getting well posted.”
“You’re mistaken,” laughed Willie. “I am doing picket duty.”
“Well, come along and we’ll do something that you will find more interesting. We’ll have to hustle, too. So be brisk.”
The voice was familiar enough, but Willie hardly recognized the well-dressed and really handsome man who was speaking to him. He had never before seen Sheridan in anything but old clothes. After an astonished look at him Willie leaped to join the Secret Service man. But the latter, instead of starting for the waterfront, turned up Broadway. A very short walk brought them to a towering office-building into which the detective turned. Willie wondered, but kept his peace. He was learning to use his mouth less and his eyes and ears more.