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Updated: June 15, 2025
Were there any boys in that other home where the carriages and the big hearse had gone? And if there were, did they have to live in an alley, and did they ever have any fun? These were thoughts that puzzled Skippy's young brain once in a while. Not very long or very hard, for Skippy had not been trained to think; what training the boys picked up in the alley didn't run much to deep thinking.
It had the call on the other gangs in all the blocks around, for it had the biggest fighters as well as the cleverest thieves of them all. Then one holiday morning, when in a hundred churches the pæan went up, "On earth peace, good-will toward men," all New York rang with the story of a midnight murder committed by Skippy's gang.
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.
He had always borne a grudge against him for that, for there was no occasion for it that he could see. Hadn't he been to the gin-mill for him that very day twice? Skippy's horizon was bounded by the towering brick walls of Scrabble Alley. No sun ever rose or set between them.
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.
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.
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.
He had always borne a grudge against him for that, for there was no occasion for it that he could see. Hadn't he been to the gin-mill for him that very day twice? Skippy's horizon was bounded by the towering brick walls of Scrabble Alley. No sun ever rose or set between them.
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