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Perhaps it was just as well. There were one or two men there who were said to know a heap, and who had thought and studied it all out about the landlord and the alley. But it was very tiresome that it should happen to be just those two, for Skippy never liked them.
"I have not had an exciting adventure since I carried the valentines for Jack and Jill, before they tumbled down hill, and perhaps to-day I may find something else to make me lively, and happy and skippy like." "Too much hopping and skipping is not good for you," the muskrat lady said. "Yes, I think it is, if you will excuse me for saying so," spoke Uncle Wiggily politely.
They had been up before the judge, and though he let them off they had been branded, Skippy and the rest, as a bad lot. That was the starting-point in Skippy's career. With the brand upon him he accepted the future it marked out for him, reasoning as little, or as vaguely, about the justice of it as he had about the home conditions of the alley.
"Is it possible, dear lady, that you, in your woman's heart, never wished that you had something to take care of besides Skippy?" "Yes, but Mr. Poons is not " began Miss Husted, and then she blurted out "I can't understand him; he can't understand me. I might talk to him for a week and he wouldn't know what I was talking about!" "Yes, but Jenny understands him. What joy have you in life alone?
The saloon-keeper whose place they were sacking to get the "stuff" for keeping Christmas in their way had come upon them, and Skippy had shot him down while the others ran. A universal shout for vengeance went up from outraged Society. It sounded the death-knell of the gang. It was scattered to the four winds, all except Skippy, who was tried for murder and hanged.
On such occasions the police made an extra raid, and more or less of the gang were scooped in; but nothing ever came of it. Dead men tell no tales, and they were not more silent than the Scrabbles, if, indeed, these had anything to tell. It came gradually to be an old story. Skippy and his associates were long since in the Rogues' Gallery, numbered and indexed as truly a bad lot now.
A stray cabbage-leaf in one of these was the only green thing it found, for no ray ever strayed through the window in Skippy's basement to trace the green mould on the wall. Once, while he had been lying sick with a fever, Skippy had struck up a real friendly acquaintance with that mouldy wall.
At the funeral services it was said that without a doubt Skippy had gone to a better home. His account was squared. Skippy's story is not invented to be told here. In its main facts it is a plain account of a well-remembered drama of the slums, on which the curtain was rung down in the Tombs yard.
From the policeman on the block to the hard-fisted man he knew as his father, and who always had a job for him with the growler when he came home, they were having Skippy on the run. Probably that was how he got his name. No one cared enough about it, or about the boy, to find out. Was there anybody anywhere who cared about boys, anyhow?
Look how the stupid, stupid fellow is holding Skippy! All the blood will rush into his poor little head. The dog, the dog; you foolish fellow; the d-o-g, dog! I can't make him understand. Please tell him, Mr. Pinac." "Hund hund!" shouted Fico to Poons. "Le chien Le chien! Idiot, stupid!" said Pinac.
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