d.

"Dat's me fader," he said. "Fourt' floor front east. He ain't in,
dough."

"Your father!" Morris cried. "Why, the people I am coming to see they
are greenhorns."

"Oh, yeh," the youngster replied; "dat's me fader's uncle. He lives wid
us."

"All right," Morris said. "Take me up there."

The youngster resumed his swollen cheek and escorted Morris up three
flights of slippery brassbound stairs. Without the formality of
knocking, they entered an apartment on the fourth floor where a woman
stood washing dishes.

"Mrs. Levin?" Morris said.

The woman nodded.

"I want to see your man's uncle," Morris continued. Without looking up
the woman cried in stentorian tones: "Mees-taire!"

In response a bent figure, clad in an alpaca caftan, appeared from an
interior bedroom. He wore a velvet skullcap, and a thin gray beard
straggled from his chin; his nose was surmounted by a pair of steel
spectacles.

"_Sholom alaicham!_" Morris cried, according the Rabbi that greeting, as
ancient as the Hebrew tongue itself--"Peace be with you."

"_Alaicham sholom!_" the Rabbi answered, and then he resorted to the
Yiddish jargon: "Do you look for me?"

"I look for the _Rav_ Elkan Levin," Morris said in a tongue to which he
had long been unaccustomed. "I am the servant of the philanthropist
Steuermann."

"Steuermann?" the _Rav_ Levin repeated. "I do not know him."

"In America," Morris said, "his name is honored over the governor's. He
sends me to you to speak for the unfortunate _Tzwee_ Kovalenko."

"_Tzwee_ Kovalenko," the old man cried, and his beard stood out as his
invisible lips tightened, while his nose became sharp and hawk-like. "A
_mishna meshuna_ to him, the same as he sent to my son."

"No," Morris declared; "he did not send it to your son. It was another
that did it."

The old man sank trembling into a nearby chair and clutched the edge of
the table.

"You tell this to me who saw with my own eyes his body!" he said in
shaking tones. "Yes, _Baron_; I saw my own child like a slaughtered
beast, all blood--not a face, but a piece of flesh. I saw him, and you
tell me this!"

"None the less," Morris went on, "if your son did die it was a _kapora_
not meant for him. It was intended for the chief of police."

The _Rav_ shook his head.

"It stands in the _Gemera_" he said, in the singsong tone of the
Talmudical reader: "If one flings a stone for pleasure and it strikes
another so that he dies, the one also shall