There was a lengthened streak of bay
mingled with the red of running gear that stretched itself out for
four blocks. Then a water-hydrant played its part in the cosmogony,
the buggy became matchwood as foreordained, and the driver rested very
quietly where he had been flung on the asphalt in front of a certain
brownstone mansion.
They came out and had him inside very promptly. And there was one who
made herself a pillow for his head, and cared for no curious eyes,
bending over and saying, "Oh, it was you; it was you all the time,
Bobby! Couldn't you see it? And if you die, why, so must I, and--"
But in all this wind we must hurry to keep in touch with our paper.
Policeman O'Brine arrested it as a character dangerous to traffic.
Straightening its dishevelled leaves with his big, slow fingers, he
stood a few feet from the family entrance of the Shandon Bells Cafe.
One headline he spelled out ponderously: "The Papers to the Front in a
Move to Help the Police."
But, whisht! The voice of Danny, the head bartender, through the
crack of the door: "Here's a nip for ye, Mike, ould man."
Behind the widespread, amicable columns of the press Policeman O'Brine
receives swiftly his nip of the real stuff. He moves away, stalwart,
refreshed, fortified, to his duties.
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