d at
once. Presently Big Tom got up, stretched his gorilla arms, yawned with
a descending scale of Oh's, and went lumbering to bed.

A wait--which to Johnnie seemed interminable, while dusk thickened to
darkness; then snores. The snoring continued all the while he was
counting up to four hundred. Also it achieved a regularity and loudness
that guaranteed it to be genuine. Still Johnnie did not open his eyes.
There were little movements in Cis's room, and he felt sure she was not
asleep. Soon he had proof of it. For peering up carefully from under
lowered lids, he saw her door slowly open; next, she came to stand in
it, dimly outlined in her faded cotton kimono.

She had something white in one hand. This she waved up and down in a
noiseless signal. He did not stir. She stole forward, bent down, and
touched him. He went on breathing deep and steadily. She tiptoed back to
her bed.

As patiently as possible he waited till the sound of her regular
breathing could be heard between Barber's rasping snores. Then he sat
up. So long as he had been able to read, he had thought of nothing but
reading. But with the book put away there had come to him a wonderful
plan--a plan that made his bony little spine gooseflesh: _He would rub
Barber's old kitchen lamp!_

Seldom used, it stood on a cupboard shelf beside the clock. Fairly
holding his breath, he got to his feet and crept across the floor. Inch
by inch, cautiously, his hand felt its way to the right shelf, found the
lamp, grasped the glass standard. But the table was the only proper
place for the experiment. He carried the lamp there and set it down, his
heart beating hard under the pleats of his shirt.

Then he considered what his course of action should be. If Big Tom's old
lamp chanced to possess even a scrap of that power peculiar to the lamp
of Aladdin: if, when he rubbed the none too clean glass base, some genie
were to appear, asking for orders--what should he command?

It came to him then that what he wanted most in all the world was not
bags of money, not dishes of massy gold, or rich robes, or slaves, but
only freedom. He wanted to get away from the flat; to leave behind him
forever the hated longshoreman.

"If the great big feller comes when I rub," he told himself, "I'll say
t' him, 'Take Grandpa and Cis and me as far away as--as Central Park'"
(this a region of delight into which he had peeped when he was three or
four years old, under escort of his Aunt Sophi