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But these poor old shabby dubs in their shabby duds a couple who were plebeian even in Jayville! If there had not been such a popular prejudice against mauling one's innocent parents about, Kedzie would probably have taken her father and mother to the dumb-waiter and sent them down to the ash-can. As she hung between despair and anxiety the telephone-bell rang.
Now, Ash-Can Sam had a reputation of his own, as every cat in the neighborhood could testify with sorrow and with tears. He weighed eleven pounds. He kept himself in training; and, where others lived for love or wealth or art, Ash-Can Sam existed for a finish fight alone.
Omar Ben had never had a fight, and yet the memory of inheritance had waked within him, revealing other traits besides his yearning for debauchery and "frawgs"; so now he squared himself and uncurled his velvet toes. Ash-Can Sam crouched low and came in with a headlong rush. Omar Ben side-stepped and raked him with a stiffly extended paw.
The flirtation, however, was short-lived, for suddenly, without an instant's warning, Miss Lizzie, Miss Mame, and Pete himself went clawing up a water-pipe to a convenient roof above, while down the street came floating a shrill, defiant yowl. "Chase yerse'f, bo!" called Pete in a voice of fear. "It's Ash-Can Sam!"
Then the street-cleaners, the "White Wings," garbage and ash-can men begin their deadly rounds, and the clang of dashing empty metal cans on the stone-paved courts and areas reverberates between high buildings until one longs for the silence of the grave. The noise and shock of blasting rock is incessant. They are blasting all along the Hudson shore and in Central Park.
It was a good rake, and there was fur upon his claws and blood. "Hully gee!" breathed Pete into Mame's convenient ear. "Did yer pipe de way bo upper-cut 'im? Gee!" Ash-Can Sam was wounded not so much in body as in pugilistic pride. He turned to wipe away the stain, and, incidentally, to wipe the earth with the body of a foreign cat.
These so-called aristocrats bring a son into existence, and, providing he's a decent-living, rule-abiding chap, he is sheltered from the world and kept for the enriching of their own hot-house of respectability. But if one of them upsets the ash-can and otherwise messes up the family escutcheon, the father says, "You have disgraced our traditions. Get thee hence into the cold, outside world.
The tea-gown had long lain in a chest, while Antonia was on her travels, and the great woman's eyes, fixed on more important things, had not perceived when it was taken out for her wear to-day that it was crushed and rumpled. Aurora believed it had been recovered from the ash-can, and her breast was filled with awe.
In the mile-away village of Hampton, there had been a veritable epidemic of burglaries ranging from the theft of a brand-new ash-can from the steps of the Methodist chapel to the ravaging of Mrs. Blauvelt's whole lineful of clothes, on a washday dusk.
Tossing his head and giving his tail a swish, he leaped toward the apparatus, neatly upsetting the filled ash-can over the head and shoulders of the bewildered driver. By a supreme effort Silver dropped into the old lope. A dozen bounds took him abreast the nigh horse, and, in spite of Lannigan's shouts, there he stuck, littering the newly swept pavement most disgracefully at every jump.
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