fishing
seine. It stood hospitably open, for the hinges of the door were all
rusted away and the dried and shrunken boards lay on the marshy ground
before the entrance. Keekie Joe had intended to make sure that there
was nothing to eat in the shanty before casting his line in the
neighboring water. For there was the barest chance that a petrified
crust of bread, ancient remnant of some fisherman's lunch, might be in
the place.

Once Keekie Joe had found such a crust there. But the place was bare
now of everything except deserted spider-webs, black and heavy with
dust. These and the mass of net upon the ground were all that Keekie
Joe could see in the light of the genial moonbeams which shone through
the open doorway and wriggled in through the cracks in the
weather-beaten boards.

And now again Keekie Joe had to make a choice. He was hungry, oh, so
hungry. But he was sleepy, too, to the point of blinking
half-consciousness. The eyes which had so often watched for "cops,"
and which had won for Keekie Joe his nickname, were half closed and he
could hardly stand. Such a price for four cigarettes!

The eyes which had been so faithful to a doubtful trust and won the pay
of an apple core, could not be trusted now to stay open while he sat, a
ragged, lonely figure, on the shore dangling his line in quest of a
morsel to eat. It was funny how these eyes, which had served others so
well, seemed about to go back on their owner now. But so it was. And
then, in a moment, a very strange thing happened.

As Keekie Joe leaned against the doorway blinking his eyes, he happened
to look up at the moon and it seemed (probably because his eyes were
blinking), it _seemed_ as if the man in the moon winked at him, in a
way shrewdly significant as if he might have something up his sleeve.
Anyway, he could not keep his eyes open; sleep, for a little while at
least, had triumphed over hunger and the faithful little sentinel of
Barrel Alley stumbled over to the pile of net and sank down, exhausted,
upon it.

And Keekie Joe dreamed a dream. A most outlandish dream. He dreamed
that the licorice jaw-breaker which that strange boy had thrown at him
was the size of a brick, and that as it fell upon the ground it broke
into a thousand luscious fragments like the pane of plate-glass through
which Keekie Joe had lately thrown a rock. He picked up the fragments
and ate them, and there before him stood the strange, small boy, who
threw