e proper path of
the sun chariot, and if they so minded, obstruct its mission or take a
wheel off.

And, perhaps, if the god-driver had an ungovernable desire to step
down, put up his flame-colored fists and manfully dispute the right of
way, he would have probably been immediately opposed by a scowling
mortal with two sets of very hard knuckles.

It is possible, perhaps, that this young man would have derided, in an
axle-wide alley, the approach of a flying ferry boat. Yet he achieved
a respect for a fire engine. As one charged toward his truck, he would
drive fearfully upon a sidewalk, threatening untold people with
annihilation. When an engine would strike a mass of blocked trucks,
splitting it into fragments, as a blow annihilates a cake of ice,
Jimmie's team could usually be observed high and safe, with whole
wheels, on the sidewalk. The fearful coming of the engine could break
up the most intricate muddle of heavy vehicles at which the police had
been swearing for the half of an hour.

A fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling thing that he
loved with a distant dog-like devotion. They had been known to
overturn street-cars. Those leaping horses, striking sparks from the
cobbles in their forward lunge, were creatures to be ineffably admired.
The clang of the gong pierced his breast like a noise of remembered war.

When Jimmie was a little boy, he began to be arrested. Before he
reached a great age, he had a fair record.

He developed too great a tendency to climb down from his truck and
fight with other drivers. He had been in quite a number of
miscellaneous fights, and in some general barroom rows that had become
known to the police. Once he had been arrested for assaulting a
Chinaman. Two women in different parts of the city, and entirely
unknown to each other, caused him considerable annoyance by breaking
forth, simultaneously, at fateful intervals, into wailings about
marriage and support and infants.

Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly
and quite reverently: "Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?"

Chapter V

The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most
rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.

None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins. The
philosophers up-stairs, down-stairs and on the same floor, puzzled over
it.

When a child, playing and fighting with gamins in the str