I saw them eye the lay-out as they went down the line, where turkey and mincepie stood waiting, and make quick, stealthy passes with their hands, but nothing happened until they had taken their seats. Then up went eight grimy fists, and eight aggrieved voices piped out:
“Mister, I ain’t got no pie!”
The superintendent chuckled.
“How is that?” he said. “No pie? There was one; I put it there myself, at every plate. Why, what is that?” And he patted each of the little rascals in the region of the bread-basket, where something stuck out in a lump inside the shirt.
“Me pie,” was the unabashed reply. “I was afeard it ’u’d get stole on me.” There was just the ghost of a wink.
“Well,” laughed the superintendent, “we’ll forget it. It is Christmas. Go ahead, boys, with your dinner.” And they fell to.
It was great. Talk about the charge of the Six Hundred. These were seven hundred, and they used their knives, their forks, and their tongues all at once and for all they were worth. The noise was deafening. You could not have heard yourself think. One alone among them all did no shouting. He devoured his dinner like a famished little wolf, and all the while he never took his ferret eyes from my face. It was in the days when New York had a militant police commissioner, who set the town by the ears every other day with his unheard-of ways of enforcing dead-letter laws, and rattled its dry bones. All of a sudden the boy snatched his fist from his mouth and pointed it straight at me.
“I know you,” he piped in a shrill treble that cut through the Babel of tongues like a knife. “I seen yer picter in de papers. Ye ’r’—ye ’r’—Teddy Roosevelt!”
Instantly there was the silence of the tomb in the big hall. Where just before one would not have known that a dray went over the pavement outside, one could all at once have heard a pin drop. Looking down the table where the miscreants sat who had tried to get a double allowance of pie, I saw something stirring, and the stolen pies appeared and were swiftly and silently deposited on the table. The dreaded name had brought them back even on a false alarm.
That was seventeen years ago. Chance carried me past the Newsboys’ Lodging-House the other day at the dinner-hour, and I went in to have a look at things. There were no newsboys there. The little shavers with their gimlet wits were gone. The boys who sat about the tables did not hail from Newspaper Row. They were older, and evidently earning their bread in shop and factory.