wants to know what they're
losing all this time for. He also says they can't sell Ben the car and
says further that we'd all better go home and sleep it off, so Ben hands
'em each a ten spot, the driver lets off his brake, and the old ark
rattles on while Ben's eyes is suffused with a suspicious moisture, as
they say.

Ben now says we must stand right on this corner to watch these cars go
by--about once every hour. We argued with him whilst we shivered in the
bracing winelike air, but Ben was stubborn. We might of been there yet
if something hadn't diverted him from this evil design. It was a string
of about fifty Italians that just then come out of a subway entrance.
They very plainly belonged to the lower or labouring classes and I
judged they was meant for work on the up-and-down street we stood on,
that being already torn up recklessly till it looked like most other
streets in the same town. They stood around talking in a delirious or
Italian manner till their foreman unlocked a couple of big piano boxes.
Out of these they took crowbars, axes, shovels, and other instruments of
their calling. Ben Sutton has been standing there soddenly waiting for
another dear old horse-car to come by, but suddenly he takes notice of
these bandits with the tools and I see an evil gleam come into his tired
eyes. He assumes a businesslike air, struts over to the foreman of the
bunch, and has some quick words with him, making sweeping motions of the
arm up and down the cross street where the horse-cars run. After a
minute of this I'm darned if the whole bunch didn't scatter out and
begin to tear up the pavement along the car-track on this cross street.
Ben tripped back to us looking cheerful once more.

"They wouldn't sell me the car," he says, "so I'm going to take back a
bunch of the dear old rails. They'll be something to remind me of the
dead past. Just think! I rode over those very rails when I was a tot."

We was all kind of took back at this, and I promptly warned Ben that
we'd better beat it before we got pinched. But Ben is confident. He says
no crime could be safer in New York than setting a bunch of Italians to
tearing up a street-car track; that no one could ever possibly suspect
it wasn't all right, though he might have to be underhanded to some
extent in getting his souvenir rails hauled off. He said he had told the
foreman that he was the contractor's brother and had been sent with this
new order and the foreman had nat