"Where did you pick up those two kids, Smokey, and his—his pal, Jimmy?"
"Oh, that's quite a yarn," said the Scoutmaster. "Both of them were New York newsboys. They got sick down there—ill-feeding, lack of care and so on, and drifted up here. We have a lot of invalids who come here for their health—rich mostly. But Jimmy and Smokey weren't rich. In fact, if a couple of our boys hadn't heard about them and done one of the best turns ever pulled off, I——"
The Commissioner leaned forward and tapped the Scoutmaster on the knee.
"Tell me the whole story," said he, his eyes sparkling. And the Scoutmaster did.
The Story the Scoutmaster Told
Smokey and Jimmy were newsboys in the big city. Smokey was much littler, I expect, when he invested his first pennies in papers and tried to hold his own with the newsboy gang at the Grand Central Station. Jimmy was cock of the walk and had licked every newsboy on the stand. He looked little Smokey over. He resented the smokiness, but hated to wallop him; there was so little to wallop. And because the other newsboys tried to, Jimmy walloped the whole lot of them all over again. After that he felt sort of responsible for Smokey's welfare.
By and by Jimmy found out that Smokey never had had any parents. He came out of a colored orphan asylum—ran away, I expect. Jimmy didn't know anything about his parents, either. He came out of a foundling hospital—ran away, too, perhaps. Anyway, Jimmy says he felt he didn't have much on Smokey. They became close friends. Smokey thought Jimmy was God's little brother, and Jimmy proved it by taking absolute charge of Smokey's destiny.
They saved their pennies. Their living didn't cost much. They fed mostly at the back door of an east side quick-lunch place. For domicile they shared a basement with a drunken janitor, an Italian organ-grinder, and a monkey. The monkey got shoved off a second-story window ledge by some Christian person who probably resented the Darwin theory and died several days later of internal injuries. Smokey nursed him, while Jimmy and the organ-grinder worked harder and raised enough money to get a doctor. The doctor was indignant when he found that his patient was of the Simian persuasion. But that's a story by itself. You ought to hear Jimmy tell it. You'd find yourself laughing on only one side of your face.
About a week after the monkey died, Smokey fell ill. He hated to get up in the morning. He was just as dead-tired in the morning as when he lay down. His smokiness turned from a soft coal to an anthracite hue, and he went off his feed. Jimmy thought maybe Smokey needed a little Christian Science and walloped him as an experiment. Smokey took it as he would have taken anything from Jimmy, but he said—and his eyes were probably as big and solemn as an owl's:
"Jimmy," said he, "dey ain't no use'n you-all wallopin' me. Hones', Jimmy, Ah tinks Ah's a moughty sick li'l nigger."