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The old baron for he was nothing less, though in Minetta Lane he passed for a cat's-meat man who peddled his odd ware from door to door had been found by the police sick and starving in his wretched cellar, and had been taken to Bellevue Hospital.
He's as smart as lightning and as crooked as he is smart. He turned up here when he was a little kid, with a woman who may or may not have been his mother. She lived with a Dago down in Minetta Lane. Guess the boy mighta been six years old when she died and Luigi took him on. We were all kind of proud of him at first. Teachers in school all said he was a wonder.
"With pleasure, and for what stakes?" returned Yorke, bending down to secure a strap which he felt loosen. "I meant but a trial of speed to the bridge there, where we cross the Minetta Water. A stake? Well, name it." "A knot of rose-colored ribbon," said Yorke softly. "Another!" cried Betty unguardedly, and could have promptly bitten her tongue for the betrayal of her thought.
You notice, don't you, that I talk to you of Minetta Lane only when something tremendous, either good or bad, has happened to me? Other men with the same weakness, you say, turn to drink. I suppose so, poor devils. Oh, Lucy, I wish I were in the Grand Canyon to-night! I wish you and I were together in Frank's camp at the foot of Bright Angel.
The blocks of fine brick houses that covered Richmond Hill are given over to Italian tenements. Minetta Brook, if it sings at all, sings among the sewers far below the dirty pavements. But Minetta Lane still lives, a short alley that debouches on MacDougal Street. Edgar Allan Poe once strolled on summer evenings through Minetta Lane with his beautiful Annabel Lee.
Suddenly he took the boy's hand in both his own. "I suppose if Jack had been reared in Minetta Lane, he'd have been just as wrong in his ideas as you are. Look here, Enoch, I'll make a bargain with you. I want you to try the Canyon for a week or so, until I get back from the Coast.
Yours has been a case for a mind specialist, all these years, not a detective. I, for one, refuse to let Minetta Lane hag ride me if it is possible to escape it." Suddenly she smiled again. "I'll admit I'm not at all Victorian in my attitude." "You couldn't be anything that was not fine," returned Enoch sadly. "But I cannot bear to have you buoy yourself with false hopes."
"Then you think " faltered the boy. "I don't think! I know that you come of fine, upstanding stock! And it's about time you moved out of Minetta Lane and gave your good blood a chance!" Enoch's lips quivered, and he turned his head toward the fire. Seaton waited, patiently. After a while he said, "Enoch, the most important thing in a man's life is his philosophy. What do you think life is for?
The piles of dirty ice and rubbish on MacDougal Street turned to fairy mountains. The dead horse in Minetta Lane might have been an Indian mound in miniature. An occasional drunken man or woman, exuding loathsome, broken sentences, reeled past Officer Foley who stood in the shadows opposite Luigi's house. He was joined silently and one at a time by half a dozen other men.
If I don't settle the matter, Enoch is going to be hag-ridden by Minetta Lane all his life. I know of a chap who was lame for twenty years because when he was about ten, he had a series of extraordinarily vivid dreams portraying a curious accident that he was not able to distinguish from actual happenings.
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