Larry Dexter, Reporter/Chapter 32
CHAPTER XXXII
IN QUEST OF PETER
The address Larry had as that where Peter had lived took him to a poor, though respectable, part of the city. It was pretty well uptown, on the East Side, and the young reporter soon found himself in a thickly-settled tenement district. The streets were filled with children, among whom pushcart peddlers shoved their vehicles laden with everything from fish to calico, and from books to suspenders. After some search Larry located the house where Peter had resided.
There were five floors, and four families lived on each.
“That makes twenty places to inquire, if I don't strike the right place first,” reasoned Larry. “Well, it's like hunting a needle in a haystack, but it's got to be done.”
He knocked at the door of the first apartment on the first floor. No one answered, and Larry tapped again, this time quite loudly. Suddenly a door across the hall opened, and a woman stuck her head out.
“Vell?” she inquired.
“Does Peter Manton live here?” asked Larry.
“Vat is?” asked the woman.
Larry repeated his question, at the same time coming closer to the door, thinking the woman had not heard him.
“Ich weiss nicht,” she replied, that being the German equivalent for “I don't know,” and then, having satisfied her curiosity, she closed the door.
“I guess that's what most of 'em will say,” remarked Larry, who understood a little German.
He was about to knock on the third door of the first floor, when a boy stuck his head out of one apartment, and of him Larry asked where Peter lived.
“Has he a wart on his nose?” asked the boy.
“No,” said Larry, who knew Peter was not marked in any such way.
“Does he squint with his left eye?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Can he turn a double somersault?”
“I don't know.”
“Is one of his front teeth gone?”
“No, his teeth are all right.”
“Then I don't know him. All the fellers I know has something the matter with 'em, or else they can do somethin', I guess the feller you want has moved away.”
But Larry did not want to trust to any chances. He went to the next floor, and made inquiries without success. Then he proceeded to the third floor. At the last apartment where he knocked an old man came to the door.
“Veil, mine friendt?” he inquired, and Larry was beginning to think all the people in the house were German Jews. “Vat can I do for you to-day?”
“Do you know Peter Manton?” asked Larry.
“Peter vat?”
“Peter Manton.”
“Does he sell suspenders?”
“Not that I ever heard of.”
“Collar buttons, maybe yet, eh?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Den he keeps a store alretty yet?”
“I guess not.”
“Oh, vell, den I doan knows him by yet. I only know peoples vat is in business. Run avay, leedle poy, an' doan bodder mit a business man,” and then, while Larry watched him, the old fellow went back, leaving his door open, and proceeded to resume his slumbers in an easy-chair, whence Larry had aroused him.
“I guess I'll get very little information here,” thought the searcher. Yet he would not give up. Not until he had knocked at the last door did he get any trace, and that came when he had almost despaired.
A woman answered the door, and, at the sight of Larry, she began to scream in a loud voice, and cried out:
“Goniff! Goniff! Goniff!”
“I'm not a thief!” exclaimed Larry, for he recognized the Yiddish word for robber, having heard it in his travels about the Jewish quarter of New York. “I haven't stolen anything, and don't intend to.”
He spoke sharply, for he feared the woman's cries would rouse the neighborhood, and, perhaps, make trouble for him. Fortunately, however, there was much noise caused by the children in the street shouting, and no one appeared to pay much attention to the woman's exclamations.
In a little while, when she saw that Larry had no evil designs, and did not attempt to steal her brass candlesticks or brass samovar, or tea-brewing apparatus, her two choicest possessions, the woman became calmer.
“Do you know Peter Manton?” asked Larry, who was beginning to tire of his own question.
“Hass he got funny eyes alretty yet?” asked the woman. “Eyes not like yours, vat look one in the face, but eyes vat always move about so” and she shifted hers rapidly.
“Yes, he has,” replied Larry, recognizing one of Peter's characteristics.
“I know him,” the woman said.
“Where is he?” cried Larry.
“Come in,” the woman requested, opening the door wider. “You must excuse me, young gentlemans. I am all alone here, and ven you comes by my door I t'ou't you vas a robbers yet. Once alretty dey comes and takes mine moneys. So I am of a carefulness when I goes py de door.”
Then, as Larry questioned her, she told in broken English how Peter had once lived in the house on the same floor she did. She remembered him because he was always playing tricks on her little nephew who had lived with her. But Peter had moved away, she said, and she did not know where.
“Can't you think? begged Larry, to whom finding the former copy boy meant so much.
“I vas so glad to see him go I care not where he lives yet, the woman answered. “But he has an aunt vat lives somewheres about t'ree blocks from here. Maybe she can tell.
Larry got the location of Peter's aunt, and with a somewhat lighter heart he set off to the address the Jewish woman had given him.
He had a little difficulty in finding Mrs. Jackson, the former copy boy's aunt, as she had moved twice since the Jewish woman knew of her, but eventually Larry discovered her. At first she was very guarded in her answers.
“What do you want to know for?“she demanded.
Then Larry told her as much of the story of his missing brother as he thought necessary. He described how he came to believe Peter had a hand in taking him away.
“I always knew Peter would come to no good end, said his aunt. “I warned my brother to whip him at least once a day to make him a better boy, but he would not, and now see what he has come to. Well, if I can help you, young man, I will. I'd just like to get hold of Peter,” and she looked as though Peter's experience under her administration would be anything but pleasant.
She looked over some old letters, and from them got the address of Peter's father, who had died some time before, leaving the boy in charge of a stepmother. To that address Larry went, only to find that the stepmother had married again, and gone away. Neighbors said Peter had not been seen about the place where he used to live, in some time. Larry was about to leave, when a boy, about his own age, who had heard his questions, said:
“I know how to find him.”
“How?” asked Larry, his heart beating high with hope again. “Tell me where he is.”
“I can't tell you where he is,” the boy answered, “but I know he hangs out in Chinatown. You go down there, and near the end of Pell Street is a Chinese grocery, with a funny image in the window. The image has a red stone in one eye, and none in the other. I know, 'cause I went with Peter once, when he was going to have me join a gang of fellers, only my mother wouldn't let me. They used to meet over that grocery. Maybe he ain't there now, but he used to be. You'll see the image in the winder. The gang he belongs to was called the Red Eye Gang.”
Thanking the lad for his information Larry hurried away. He felt that at last he was on the trail, and wanted to follow it up at once. He made his way to Chinatown, and was soon in that section of the city where so much crime abounds.
He had seldom been there, for only the older reporters were sent on stories in that locality. It was not altogether safe in daytime, and at night it must be a bold man who would venture there alone.
At first all the streets seemed made up of groceries and Chinese laundries. Pell Street appeared to be one continuous string of them, and each one seemed to have some sort of an image or idol in the window.
“I guess I'll have my own troubles picking out the place,” thought Larry. “They all look alike. However, I'll be on the watch for the one-eyed image.”
He had almost reached the end of Pell Street when, in the window of a small store, that seemed to be trying to hide away from sight between two larger ones, he spied a big wooden idol in the window. Before it burned a number of Joss sticks, and, as Larry placed his nose against the pane, he discerned dimly through the smoke that the image had one eye, made of a red stone, but that the socket of the other was empty, giving an odd expression to the grinning face.
“This must be the place,” thought Larry, his heart beating rapidly with hope. He looked up at the windows. They were screened with red curtains, and seemed never to have been washed. There was a door leading to a hallway at one side of the grocery entrance. Larry resolved to try the store first. He found a fat Chinese smoking behind a counter.
“Wha' bloy wan'?” inquired the Celestial. “Glot nice clulumbler, melon sleed, ginger loot, nuts. Wha' bloy want?”
“I didn't come to buy anything,” Larry explained, speaking slowly, so the almond-eyed one could understand him. “Do you know anybody named Peter Manton? He's a boy I'm looking for. Do you know Peter Manton?”
The answer of the Chinese was no less prompt than it was startling. He leaped to his feet, dropping his pipe to the floor, and seizing a heavy vase from the counter threw it straight at Larry's head. The boy ducked only just in time, and the ornament was shattered against the wall.
“I show you, Pleter Manton!” exclaimed the Celestial, running from behind the counter, while Larry, who had straightened up, after ducking down, did not know what to make of it at all.