Irvin S. Cobb

“ After mamma died I don't know what we should have done—two girls left alone in this old house—if it hadn't been for Aunt Sharley. She petted us, she protected us, she nursed us when we were sick. Why, Harvey, she couldn't have been more loyal or more devoted or more self-sacrificing than she has been through all these years while we were growing up. I know she loves us with every drop of blood in her veins. I know she'd work her fingers to the bone for us—that she'd die in her tracks fighting for us. ”

“ Up comes the first and foremost of the tiny tots. The Santy Claus stocking reaches out and annexes the free-will offering. There's a faint crunching sound; that there sack of peanuts has went to the bourne from out which no peanut, up until that time, has ever been known to return; and Emily is smiling benevolently and reaching out for the next sack. And behind the second kid is the third kid, and behind the third kid still more kids, and as far as the human eye can reach, there ain't nothing on the horizon of that show-shop but just kids—kids and peanuts. ”

“ At the top of the beach, girdling it on its land [306] side, and stencilling themselves against the sky line, ran a fringing of coconut palms. The trunks were naked almost to the tops, where the foliage revealed itself in flaring clumps of green. Viewed separately a tree was suggestive of a great bird standing on one leg with its head hidden under its wing, its rump up-reared and its splayed tail feathers saluting the skies. Viewed together they made a spectacle for which nothing in the temperate zones, animal or vegetable, offers a measurable comparison. ”

“ The front line of a stretch of tallish buildings stood out in relief against the background of a wet moon and showed him, high up on the iron ladder which flighted down the face of one house of the row, two dark clumps, one placed just above the other.
Ginsburg slipped into a protecting ledge of shadow close up against the buildings and edged along nearer. The clumps resolved into the figures of men. One—the uppermost shape of a man—was receiving from some unseen sources flat burdens that came down over the roof coping and passing them along to the accomplice below. ”

“ When the city is a brazen skillet, whereon mankind, assailed by the sun from above and by the stored-up heat from below, fries on both sides like an egg; when nerves are worn to frazzle-ends; when men and women, suffocating by tedious degrees in the packed and steaming tenements, lie there and curse the day they were born—then comes the annual "crime wave," as the papers love to name it. ”

“ Those who came foremost upon the scene would, through caution, hesitate for a brief space of time before venturing close up to where the hunched shape lay. Then having circled and drawn in about the victim of the shooting they would for another brief period huddle together, asking excited and pointless questions of one another, some of them perhaps bending down and touching the victim to see whether he lived, some of them looking round for a policeman, some of them doing nothing at all—except confusedly to get in the way of everybody else. ”

“ At the head of the procession marched Peep O'Day—only, of course, the proprietor didn't know it was Peep O'Day—a queer figure in his rumpled black clothes and his red-topped brass-toed boots, and with one hand holding fast to the string of a captive toy balloon. Behind him, in an uneven jostling formation, followed many small boys and some small girls. A census of the ranks would have developed that here were included practically all the juvenile white population who otherwise, through a lack of funds, would have been denied the opportunity to patronise this circus or, in fact, any circus. ”

“ For just as he pressed his bulk into the recess the man hunt manifested itself. Bursting headlong out of the front of Wallinger's Hotel came a policeman—doubtlessly the one already seen by Trencher—and just behind the policeman a roughly dressed bearded man, and with these two, at their heels, a jostling impetuous swarm of other men, to be joined instantly by yet more men, who had run round the corner of the hotel from Thirty-ninth Street, instead of passing through its lobby. ”

“ That chill and gloomy hour when condemned men and milkmen rise up from where they lie, when sick folk die in their beds and the drowsy birds begin to chirp themselves awake found the men of this particular battalion in shallow front-line trenches on the farther edge of a birch thicket. There they crouched, awaiting the word. The flat cold taste of before sunup was clammy in their throats; the smell of the fading nighttime was in their nostrils.
And in the heart of every man of them that man over and over again asked himself a question. ”

“ The street in front is lined on both sides with dagos with peanut-stands, selling peanuts to the population as fast as they can pass 'em out; and there's a long line, mainly kids, at the box-office. I goes on in and takes a flash at the front of the house through the peephole in the curtain, and the place is already jam full. If there's one kid out there, there's a thousand, and every tiny tot has got a sack of peanuts clutched in his or her chubby fist, as the case may be. And say, listen: there's a smell in the air like a prairie fire running through a Georgia goober-king's plantation. ”

“ Ginsburg winced at the pain but did not speak; he had not spoken at all up until now, leaving it to Casane as the elder man to conduct the preliminaries.
"Why don't you say something, you Jew!" taunted the prisoner. "Don't you even know enough to excuse yourself when you stick your fat feet in people's way?"
"That'll be all right," said Ginsburg crisply. It was his business to avoid the issue of a clash. "And it'll be all right your calling me a Jew. I am a Jew and I'm proud of it. ”

“ Trencher, drawing up alongside the limousine, was searching vainly for a monogram, a crest or a name on its varnished flank while he spoke.
"Driver," he said sharply, "whose car is this?"
"Mr. O'Gavin's," the chauffeur answered without turning to look at the person asking the question.
Trencher played a blind lead and yet not such a very blind lead either. Big as New York was there was likely to be but one O'Gavin in it who would have a car such as this one anchored in front of the Clarenden—and that would be the noted bookmaker. Trencher played his card. ”

“ Inside of ten minutes, which to him seemed no more than a minute, seeing that he was in love and time always speeds fast for a lover with his sweetheart, the old black woman came hurrying back up the side street, and turned in at the side gate and retraversed the lawn to the back of the old house, giving the vine-screened porch a swift searching look as she hobbled past its corner. ”

“ Chinamen casting stolid, slant-eyed glances over the rim of the void before them and filled with the calmness of the fatalist who believes that whatever is to be, is to be; white men upon whom at the last, when all prospect of intervention was gone, a mental numbness mercifully descended with the result that they came to the rope's embrace like men in a walking coma, with glazed, unseeing eyes, and dragging feet ”

“ Cassidy, wiser in the tricks of the hunter and the hunted, made a darting grab with both hands for the shoulder which he had released. His greedy fingers closed on space. The suspect, with a desperate and unexpected agility, had given his body a backward nimble fling that carried him sprawling through a gap between the ornamental bushes fringing the park sward. Instantly he was up and, with never a backward glance, was running across the lower, narrower verge of Indian Field, making for the trees which edged it thickly upon the east. He could run fast, too. ”

“ Profaning the name of his Maker with every breath, he cursed the President of the United States who had declined to reprieve him, the justices of the high court who had denied his appeal from the verdict of the lower, the judge who had tried him, the district attorney who had prosecuted him, the grand jurors who had indicted him, the petit jurors who had voted to convict him, the witnesses who had testified against him, the posse men who had trapped him, consigning them all and singly to everlasting damnation. ”

“ He would linger in the background, an unobtrusive bystander, until the condemned sinner had gone through the mockery of eating his last breakfast; and, still making himself inconspicuous during the march to the gallows, would trail at the very tail of the line, while the short, straggling procession was winding out through gas-lit murky hallways into the pale dawn-light slanting over the walls of the gravel-paved, high-fenced compound built against the outer side of the prison close. ”

“ Now the tall man, the one conspicuously dressed, had been Trencher. The shooting accomplished he stood where he was only long enough to see Sonntag fold up and sink down in a slumped shape in the doorway. He had seen men, mortally stricken, who folded up in that very same way; therefore he appraised Sonntag as one already dead, or at least as one who would die very speedily. ”

“ Only at the intersection of Thirty-ninth Street was there evidence, in the quick movement of pedestrians out of Broadway into the cross street, that something unusual served to draw foot passengers off their course.
In front of the clothing shop three doors south of him no special congestion of traffic revealed itself; no scrouging knot of citizens was to be seen, and by that Trencher reasoned that the negro had been taken elsewhere by his captors—very probably to where the body would still be lying, hunched up in the shadow before the Jollity's side doors. ”

“ I let you get away and then I trailed you—in a taxi.
"All the time you was on that street car I was riding along right behind you, and I came up these steps here not ten feet behind you. I wanted you all for myself and I've got you all by myself."
"You don't hate yourself, exactly, do you?" said Trencher. "Well, without admitting anything—because there's nothing to admit—I'd like to know, if you don't mind, how you dope it out that I had anything to do with Sonntag's being killed—that is if you're not lying about him being killed?" ”

“ He gathered that it would take at least an hour to mend the mishap, perhaps even longer, and he was not minded to wait.
"I'll walk across yonder and catch the subway," he said. "You mend the car and bring it downtown when you get it mended."
At its farthest point north, the Broadway subway, belying its name, emerges from the earth and becomes an elevated structure, rearing high above the ground. Its northernmost station stands aloft, butt-ended and pierced [73] with many windows, like a ferry-boat cabin set up on stilts. ”

“ Within another year the requisite sum which this pair of canny prudent souls had set as their modest goal would be reached; and then he could bid an everlasting farewell to these hated islands and go sailing home—home to South New Medford and to Miss Hetty Stowe. And then she would surrender the place she had held for so long as the teacher of District School Number Four, to become Mrs. Ethan Allen Pratt, a wife honoured, a helpmate well-beloved.
So to him the coming of the steamer meant more than an orgy of drunken beachcombers and a bustle of life and activity upon the beach ”

“ Half an hour after I had heard Westerfeltner's confession and fifteen minutes after I had seen the druggist and his clerk, the entire machinery of our branch of the service had been set in motion to find out what women in Washington were friends of Geltmann. For Geltmann spent most of last fall in Washington. Now while in Washington he was noticeably attentive to just two women—Miss Ballister and Madame Ybanca. Now mark a lengthening of the parallel: Both of them are small women; both of them are slender; both are young, and both of course have refined voices. ”

“ Her voice soared shrilly to match the heights of her tantrum.
"Your wages will go on just the same—Harvey insists on that as much as we do," Emmy Lou essayed. "Don't you see, Auntie, that your life will be easier? You will have your own little home and your own little garden. You can come to see us—come every day if you want to. We'll come to see you. Things between us will go on almost exactly the same as they do now. You know how much we love you—Mildred and I. You know we are trying to think of your comfort, don't you?"
"Of course you do, Aunt Sharley," Mildred put in. ”

“ To be sure, being affectionate with a bull about the [388] size and general specifications of a furniture-car had its drawbacks. She was liable to lean up against you in a playful, kittenish kind of a way, and cave in most of your ribs. It was like having a violent flirtation with a landslide to venture up clost to Emily when she was in one of her tomboy moods. I've know' her to nudge a friend with one of her front elbows and put both his shoulder-blades out of socket. ”