the boy with glue on his fingers, the original sticky-fingered kid. And poor Mrs. Schmaltz, Lord have mercy on her poor soul. God was merciful to take her away before she could know how her boy went up the road to Joliet on a ten-year jolt for burglary. The poor little woman, how she used to come around and tell of the things her Heinie found. She’d say, in her German dialect, My Heinie, he finds the grandest things. Vy, ony yesterday, I tell you, I tell you, he found a diamond ring, vy, can you himagine hit! And that time she and Mrs. McGoorty got to talking about which of their boys were the luckiest, and about the fine things my Heinie found, and the fine things my Mike is always pickin’ up. Good souls they were. And there was Dinny Gorman, the fake silk-hat. When Dinny would tote himself by, they’d all haw-haw because he was like an old woman. He was too bright, if you please, to associate with ordinary fellows. Once a guy from New York came around, and he was damned if High-hat Dinny, who’d never been to the big burg, didn’t sit down and try to tell this guy about New York. Dinny had made a little dough, but he was, after all, only a shyster lawyer and a cheap politician. He had been made ward committeeman because he had licked everybody’s boots. And there were his own brothers. Bill had run away to sea at seventeen and nobody had ever heard from him again. Jack, Lord have mercy on his soul, had always been a wild and foolish fellow, and man or devil couldn’t persuade him not to join the colors for the war with Spain, and he’d been killed in Cuba, and it had nearly broken their mother’s heart in two. Lord have mercy on his and her and the old man’s souls. He’d been a fool, all right! Poor Jack! And Mike had run off and married a woman older than himself, and he was now in the east, and not doing so well, and his wife was an old crow, slobbering in a wheel chair. And Joe was a motorman. And Catherine, well, he hadn’t even better think of her. Letting a traveling salesman get her like that, and expecting to come home with her fatherless baby; and then going out and becoming... a scarlet woman. His own sister, too! God! Nope, his family had not turned out so well. They hadn’t had, none of them, the persistence that he had. He had stuck to his job and nearly killed himself working. But now he was reaping his rewards. It had been no soft job when he had started as a painter’s apprentice, and there weren’t strong unions then like there were now, and there was no eight-hour day, neither, and the pay was nothing. In them days, many’s the good man that fell off a scaffold to die or become permanently injured. Well, Pat Lonigan had gone through the mill, and he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and while he was not exactly sitting in the plush on Easy Street, he was a boss painter, and had his own business, and pretty soon maybe he’d even be worth a cool hundred thousand berries. But life was a funny thing, all right. It was like Mr. Dooley said, and he had never forgotten that remark, because Dooley, that is Finley Peter Dunne, was a real philosopher. Who’ll tell what makes one man a thief, and another man a saint?
He took a long puff. He gazed out, and watched a group of kids, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, boys like Bill, who sat in the gravel near the backstop close to the Michigan Avenue fence. What do kids talk about? He wondered, because a person’s own childhood got so far away from him he forgot most of it, and sometimes it seemed as if he’d never been a kid himself, he forgot the way a kid felt, the thoughts of a kid. He sometimes wondered about Bill. Bill was a fine boy. You couldn’t find a better one up on the graduating stage at St. Patrick’s tonight, no more than you would see a finer girl than Frances. But sometimes he wondered just what Bill thought about.
He puffed. It was nice sitting there. He would like to sit there, and watch it slowly get dark, because when it was just getting dark things were quiet and soft-like, and a fellow liked to sit in all the quiet and well, just sit, and let any old thoughts