Jim had a very clear idea that the city of New York, with its thousands of sharp-eyed policemen, was no place for him. His four friends, however, were better acquainted with it and they now proposed to work their way down town before daylight, to hiding places they said they knew of. They urged him to come with them but he responded:
“Too many of us together, all in House of Refuge grey jackets. We’d better scatter. I’m for the country!”
Then it was “Good-bye, Jim!” all around, and “O! If you haven’t done it!”—“You’re the best kind of fellow!”—“Hope we’ll see you again, some day.”
“Not in the House of Refuge,” said Jim. “I won’t let them catch me. Now you’re out, keep out, but I tell you what, boys, we haven’t anything to say against any of those officers.”
So they all said, and they were off, working their stealthy way along among the huge piles of lumber. How the rest got out of the lumber yard, Jim never knew, but he found a gap in its high, picket fence, squeezed through it, and found himself in an open street. It was pretty well lighted, except for the fog, and Jim saw something, at once, that made him shiver, a little.
“Just what I was afraid of!” he said. “I must wait till he moves on. He might pick me up, any way, for being here at this time o’ night.”
He did not know that the policeman he saw, standing under the lamp at the street corner, was already warned and was on the lookout for five boys who had escaped from Randall’s Island. He was a real danger, therefore, and Jim did well to wait patiently until the officer marched away into the mist. Jim went forward, then, and his main idea was to get as far away as possible from the water-front.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed at the end of many minutes of brisk walking. “What’s this?”
Before him seemed to be a vast hollow, and the street he was on ran right across it, without any buildings on either side.
“New street,” he said. “It’s the new part of the city.—There!—That’s the rap of a policeman’s club on the sidewalk. My only chance is to hide!”
Down he went, over the wall-like side of that new street, clinging with toes and fingers to rough projections. In a moment more he was at the bottom, crouching close and looking up while a man in a blue uniform strolled slowly along the sidewalk.
“It isn’t as high as the wall around the parade-ground,” thought Jim. “That’s too smooth to climb.—I hope the other fellows’ll get away, now they’re out. It wasn’t just right for me to let ’em out, but I couldn’t help it. It’d be awful if all the boys in the House got away! I don’t belong there, though. But what can I do? Where on earth can I go?—Anyhow, I must keep hid till daylight.”
It was cold, it was foggy, and his heart sank within him as he crept slowly along the base of the wall, on a kind of exploring expedition. It was dreary waiting, but the time did wear away and the fog cleared when the sun rose.
People were arising, also, and Rodney Nelson was among those who were up and dressed very early. He had business on his hands, now, and he stepped right out of his own room and across the entry, into what he was beginning to call “the store.” It did indeed contain a great deal of counter and some shelving, but nothing as yet, that looked like a stock of goods.
“We’ll have some, I guess,” said Rodney. “I’ll go out and take a look at the garden. Nothing has sprouted yet, but lettuce and radishes, but it’s going to be the bulliest kind of garden.”
Downstairs he went, and his mother was busy around the stove when he passed through the kitchen. Somebody seemed to be calling him, around the corner of the house. He heard a loud:
“Ba a-a-beh?” like a question.
“Guess he’d like some breakfast,” said Rodney, as he stepped forward.
There was Billy, looking down from the edge of the sidewalk, but it was not the goat that gave Rodney such a start of surprise. Right before him stood a boy of about his own age and size, dressed from head to foot in dark, grey cloth. He seemed a healthy enough boy, but just now his face was very pale. He had been standing, for Rodney had seen him, close to the wall, where the house came against it, as if he were hiding. On the sidewalk above, and less than a hundred yards away, a policeman was walking leisurely along toward the Nelson place.
“Hullo!” said Rodney. “Who are you? What are you down here for?”
It was all right to question him, but the stranger’s face flushed suddenly and he breathed a long, choking kind of breath, before he exclaimed:
“I say, were you ever in prison?” His voice had a husky, despairing tone.
“No, I never was!” replied Rodney, with strong emphasis. “Was you?”
“Yes, I was,” came promptly back. “My name’s Jim Harris, and I didn’t do a thing. Didn’t steal a cent. But I’ve been in the House of Refuge for a good deal more’n a year——”
“And you got out?” shouted Rodney, enthusiastically. “Hurrah!”
“I got out last night,” said Jim, “and they’re after me, now——”
“Rodney!” exclaimed an excited voice behind him. “Don’t you let them get him! I saw him, from our house, and I came over to tell you. If you do let them get him!”
“Of course I won’t, Millie,” said Rodney, “but he must come right into the house. They’d know him, right away, by his rig.”
Millie was thinking with all her might, and her eyes were dancing their liveliest.
“Rod!” she said. “Take him in! Get him something to eat. I’ll go and get some of Tom’s old clothes. Mother’d let him have ’em all, before she’d see him sent to prison again. O, dear me! It was awful! And he didn’t do anything to be sent there for, either.”
“I guess it was awful——” said Rodney, but she interrupted him:
“I’ll be back as quick as I can. Besides, I want to know how he got out. He must be real hungry——” and away she went.
“Come on, Jim,” said Rodney. “You’ll be safe, in our house. I’m glad you didn’t do it, though. Tell you what, if it had been me, I’d ha’ broke loose. How’d you ever manage to do it? Tell us——”
“I will,” said Jim, as he followed his new friend, but a sudden change had come over him.
His step was light and springy, and his face was bright with new hope. He had watched there in the raw, chilly morning until he had grown almost desperate. Not that he had wished himself back in the House of Refuge, but that he had felt very tired, very hungry, and altogether uncertain what to do next, or where to go.
“Mother!” shouted Rodney, with a sort of effort not to shout quite so loud:
“He’s from Randall’s Island! He got away last night, and the cops are after him. Millie’s going to bring him some of Tom’s clothes——”
“Rodney!” she exclaimed. “Why, how did he get here?—~Now, you keep still and let him tell me all about it.”
That was precisely what Rod was very willing to do, and Jim was glad enough to tell them everything.
“O, Rod!” said his mother. “What if it had been you!—His uncle ought to be put there, himself,—and what could his aunt have been thinking of——”
“’Twasn’t her fault,” said Jim, “and the money was really gone. Somebody took it, but I didn’t, and Uncle John may not have been so much to blame. He never liked me anyhow——”
“He ought not to have sent you to jail,” said Mrs. Nelson, positively. “And I suppose they treated you awfully. Did they flog you much?”
“No, they didn’t,” said Jim. “They never flog anybody. It’s the best place in the world for loads of those boys. They get a chance to learn something and they have to behave themselves. What I mean is that I didn’t do anything to go there for, and I didn’t belong there. They’re the best kind of men for the boys that ought to be there.”
He really came up with a good deal of energy to the defence of the House of Refuge and its management, but he was tremendously in earnest in his assertion that he would not go back there again. He had hardly completed his wonderful story of escape, before the door of the kitchen opened, half stealthily, and they heard the voice of Mrs. Kirby:
“Go right in, Millie. Don’t say a word. Don’t speak about him. Somebody else might be there and hear you. Don’t you run any risk of anybody’s knowing what they’re for. If they don’t fit him, I can alter them——”
“Come right in, Mrs. Kirby,” called out Mrs. Nelson, but Millie was in first, with her arms full of coats, trousers and other matters, that had nothing grey about them.
“That’s the checker!” shouted Rod. “That old blue. It’s patched, some, but it’ll do first-rate. He won’t look like the same fellow. Come on, Jim. Come into the front room and put ’em on. Mother, you tell ’em just how it was.—Guess the cops won’t get him out of our house.”
There was plainly no danger that anybody now in it would help them, and Jim’s possible peril from anybody else was certainly very much less when, a few minutes later, he came back into the kitchen. Mrs. Nelson had, meantime, been telling his story, as he told it, with sympathetic additions of her own.
“It fits him!” shouted Millie, but her mother exclaimed:
“Rodney! What did you put on him that old red necktie for?”
“Guess there isn’t anything like it on Randall’s Island,” said Rodney. “All he’s got to do, now, is to keep still till they stop hunting for him.”
“They’re hunting, everywhere, just now,” remarked Jim. “I wish I knew what had become of those other fellows.”
“Just you come and eat your breakfast,” said Mrs. Nelson. “Don’t mind them——”
“We must go home,” said Millie, “and I can’t come right back. I’ve a lot of type-setting to do——”
“I can set type,” said Jim. “I was in the printing office, all the while.”
“That’s it!” exclaimed Mrs. Kirby. “Come right over, after breakfast. The last place they’d look into would be Mr. Kirby’s office. You can earn something, too.”