“Yer fayther, he used fer ter drive th’ wagon fer ’im. Big Bill ’n’ Little Bill, we used fer ter call him ’n’ yer bruther. Yer fayther wuzn’ fond uv worrk, I guess.”
“He used to get cramps,” said Tom simply.
“He used fer ter lick yez, I’m thinkin’.”
“Maybe we deserved to get licked,” said Tom. “Anyway I did.”
“Yer right, ye did,” agreed Pete.
“My brother was better than I was. It made me mad when I saw him get licked. I could feel it way down in my fingers, kind of—the madness. That’s why he went to live at Schmitt’s after my father got so he couldn’t work much. They always had lots to eat at Schmitt’s. I didn’t ever work there myself,” he added with his customary blunt honesty, “because I was a hoodlum.”
“Wal, I see ye’ve growed up ter be a foine lad, jist the same,” said Pete consolingly, “’n’ mebbe the lad as kin feel the tingles ter see’s bruther git licked unfair is as good as that same bruther, whativer!”
Tom said nothing, but gazed up at the windows of the apartment above the store where the Schmitts had lived. How he had once envied Bill his place in that home of good cheer and abundance! He remembered the sauerkraut and the sausages which Bill had told him of, and he had not believed Bill’s extravagant declaration that “at Schmitt’s you could have all you want to eat.” To poor Tom, living with his wretched father in the two-room tenement in Barrel Alley, with nothing to eat at all, these accounts of the Schmitt household had seemed like a tale from the Arabian Nights. Once his father had sent him there to get fifty cents from thrifty and industrious Bill, and Tom remembered the shiny oilcloth on the kitchen floor, the snowy white fluted paper on the shelves, the stiff, spotless apron on the buxom form of Mrs. Schmitt, whom Mr. Schmitt had called “Mooder.”
Tom Slade, of Barrel Alley, had revenged himself on Bill and all the rest of this by stealing apples from the front of the store and calling, “Dirty Dutchman”—a singularly inappropriate epithet—at Mr. Schmitt. But he realized now that Mr. Schmitt had been a kind and hospitable man, a much better husband and father than poor Bill Slade, senior, had ever been, and an extremely good friend to lucky Bill, junior, who had lived so near to Heaven, in that immaculate home, as to have all the sauerkraut and sausage and potato salad and rye bread and Swiss cheese and coffee cake that he could possibly manage—and more besides.