rnoon a carriage brought three travelers for one of the ships, a
man, his wife and a little girl with shining yellow pig-tails. "To be
et," Sam whispered as we stood close beside them. And then, pointing to
some of the half-naked brown men that made the crew of the ship near
by--"cannibals," he muttered. For a long time I stared at these eaters,
especially at their lean brown stomachs.

"We're safe enough," Sam told me. "They ain't allowed to come ashore." I
found this very comforting.

But what a frightful fate lay in store for the little girl with
pig-tails. As I watched her I felt worse and worse. Why couldn't
somebody warn her in time? At last I decided to do it myself. Procuring
a scrap of paper I retired behind a pile of crates and wrote in my
large, clumsy hand, "You look out--you are going to be et." Watching my
chance, I slipped this into her satchel and hoped that she would read it
soon. Then I promptly forgot all about her and ran off into a warehouse
where the gang had gone to slide.

These warehouses had cavernous rooms, so dark you could not see to the
ends, and there from between the wooden columns the things from the
ships loomed out of the dark like so many ghosts. There were strange
sweet smells. And from a hole in the ceiling there was a twisting chute
of steel down which you could slide with terrific speed. We used to
slide by the hour.

Outside were freight cars in long lines, some motionless, some suddenly
lurching forward or back, with a grinding and screeching of wheels and a
puffing and coughing from engines ahead. Sam taught me how to climb on
the cars and how to swing off while they were going. He had learned from
watching the brakemen that dangerous backward left-hand swing that lands
you stock-still in your tracks. It is a splendid feeling. Only once
Sam's left hand caught, I heard a low cry, and after I jumped I found
him standing there with a white face. His left hand hung straight down
from the wrist and blood was dripping from it.

"Shut up, you damn fool!" he said fiercely.

"I wasn't saying nothing," I gasped.

"Yes, you was--you was startin' to cry! Holy Christ!" He sat down
suddenly, then rolled over and lay still. Some one ran for his mother,
and after a time he was carried away. I did not see him again for some
weeks.

We did things that were bad for a boy of my size, and I saw things that
I shouldn't have seen--a docker crushed upon one of the docks and
brought out on a