dangling from a cow's neck. The sound came right to
the door and Squire Gathers wallowed among the chair legs.

The door swung open. In the doorway stood a negro child, barefooted and
naked except for a single garment, eyeing them with serious, rolling
eyes--and, with all the strength of his two puny arms, proudly but
solemnly tolling a small rusty cowbell he had found in the cowyard.

III

AN OCCURRENCE UP A SIDE STREET

"See if he's still there, will you?" said the man listlessly, as if
knowing in advance what the answer would be.

The woman, who, like the man, was in her stocking feet, crossed the
room, closing the door with all softness behind her. She felt her way
silently through the darkness of a small hallway, putting first her ear
and then her eye to a tiny cranny in some thick curtains at a front
window.

She looked downward and outward upon one of those New York side streets
that is precisely like forty other New York side streets: two unbroken
lines of high-shouldered, narrow-chested brick-and-stone houses, rising
in abrupt, straight cliffs; at the bottom of the canyon a narrow river
of roadway with manholes and conduit covers dotting its channel
intermittently like scattered stepping stones; and on either side wide,
flat pavements, as though the stream had fallen to low-water mark and
left bare its shallow banks. Daylight would have shown most of the
houses boarded up, with diamond-shaped vents, like leering eyes, cut in
the painted planking of the windows and doors; but now it was night
time--eleven o'clock of a wet, hot, humid night of the late summer--and
the street was buttoned down its length in the double-breasted fashion
of a bandmaster's coat with twin rows of gas lamps evenly spaced. Under
each small circle of lighted space the dripping, black asphalt had a
slimy, slick look like the sides of a newly caught catfish. Elsewhere
the whole vista lay all in close shadow, black as a cave mouth under
every stoop front and blacker still in the hooded basement areas. Only,
half a mile to the eastward a dim, distant flicker showed where Broadway
ran, a broad, yellow streak down the spine of the city, and high above
the broken skyline of eaves and cornices there rolled in cloudy waves
the sullen red radiance, born of a million electrics and the flares from
gas tanks and chimneys, which is only to be seen on such nights as this,
giving to the heaven above New York that same color tone you find in