Crowded Out o' Crofield; or, The Boy who made his Way by William O. Stoddard (read my book txt) 📗

going a little farther Jack exclaimed;

"I don't care! I've just got to eat!"

He was getting farther and farther from the Hotel Dantzic, and suddenly his eyes were caught by a very taking sign, at the top of some neat steps leading down into a basement:

"DINNER. ROAST BEEF. TWENTY-FIVE CENTS."

"That'll do." said Jack eagerly. "I can stand that. Roost beef alone is forty cents at the Dantzic."

Down he went and found himself in a wide comfortable room, containing two long dining tables, and a number of small oblong tables, and some round tables, all as neat as wax. It was a very pleasant place, and a great many other hungry people were there already.

Jack sat down at one of the small tables, and a waiter came to him at once.

"Dinner sir? Yessir. Roast beef, sir? Yessir. Vegetables? Potatoes? Lima-beans? Sweet corn?"

"Yes, please," said Jack. "Beef, potatoes, beans, and corn?" and the waiter was gone.

It seemed to be a long time before the beef and vegetables came, but they were not long in disappearing after they were on the table.

The waiter had other people to serve, but he was an attentive fellow.

"Pie sir?" he said, naming five kinds without a pause.

"Custard-pie," said Jack.

"Coffee, sir? Yessir," and he darted away again.

"This beats the Hotel Dantzic all to pieces," remarked Jack, as he went on with his pie and coffee; but the waiter was scribbling something upon a slip of paper, and when it was done he put it down by Jack's plate.

"Jingo!" said Jack in a horrified tone, a moment later. "What's this? 'Roast beef, 25; potatoes, 10; Lima-beans, 10; corn, 10; bread, 5; coffee, 10; pie, 10: $0.80.' Eighty cents! Jingo! How like smoke it does cost to live in New York! This can't be one of the cheap places Mr. Guilderaufenberg meant."

Jack felt much chagrined, but he finished his pie and coffee bravely. "It's a sell," he said, "—but then it was a good dinner!"

He went to the cashier with an effort to act as if it was an old story to him. He gave the cashier a dollar, received his change, and turned away, as the man behind the counter remarked to a friend at his elbow:

"I knew it. He had the cash. His face was all right."

"Clothes will fool anybody," said the other man.

Jack heard it, and he looked at the men sitting at the tables.

"They're all wearing Sunday clothes," he thought, "but some are no better than mine. But there's a difference. I've noticed it all along."

So had others, for Jack had not seen one in that restaurant who had on at all such a suit of clothes as had been made for him by the Crofield tailor.

"Four dollars and seventy cents left," said Jack thoughtfully, as he went up into the street; and then he turned to go down-town without any reason for choosing that direction.

An hour later, Mr. Gilderaufenberg and his wife and their friends were standing near the front door of the Hotel Dantzic, talking with the proprietor. Around them lay their baggage, and in front of the door was a carriage. Evidently they were going away earlier than they had intended.

"Dot poy!" exclaimed the broad and bearded German. "He find us not here ven he come. You pe goot to dot poy, Mr. Keifelheimer."

"So!" said the hotel proprietor, and at once three other voices chimed in with good-bye messages to Jack Ogden. Mr. Keifelheimer responded:

"I see to him. He will come to Vashington to see you. So!"

Then they entered the carriage, and away they went.

After walking for a few blocks, Jack found that he did not know exactly where he was. But suddenly he exclaimed:

"Why, if there isn't City Hall Square! I've come all the way down Broadway."

He had stared at building after building for a time without thinking much about them, and then he had begun to read the signs.

"I'll come down this way again to-morrow," he said. "It's good there are so many places to work in. I wish I knew exactly what I would like to do, and which of them it is best to go to. I know! I can do as I did in Crofield. I can try one for a while, and then, if I don't like it, I can try another. It is lucky that I know how to do 'most anything."

The confident smile had come back. He had entirely recovered from the shock of his eighty-cent expenditure. He had not met many people, all the way down, and the stores were shut; but for that very reason he had bad more time to study the signs.

"Very nearly every kind of business is done on Broadway," he said, "except groceries and hardware,—but they sell more clothing than anything else. I'll look round everywhere before I settle down; but I must look out not to spend too much money till I begin to make some."

"It's not far now," he said, a little while after, "to the lower end of the city and to the Battery. I'll take a look at the Battery before I go back to the Hotel Dantzic."

Taller and more majestic grew the buildings as he went on, but he was not now so dazed and confused as he had been in the morning.

"Here is Trinity Church, again," he said. "I remember about that. And that's Wall Street. I'll see that as I come back; but now I'll go right along and see the Battery. Of course there isn't any battery there, but Mr. Guilderaufenberg said that from it I could see the fort on Governor's Island."

Jack did not see much of the Battery, for he followed the left-hand sidewalk at the Bowling Green, where Broadway turns into Whitehall Street. He had so long been staring at great buildings whose very height made him dizzy, that he was glad to see beside them some which looked small and old.

"I'll find my way without asking," he remarked to himself. "I'm pretty near the end now. There are some gates, and one of them is open. I'll walk right in behind that carriage. That must be the gate to the Battery."

The place he was really looking for was at some distance to the right, and the carriage he was following so confidently, had a very different destination.

The wide gateway was guarded by watchful men, not to mention two policemen, and they would have caught and stopped any boy who had knowingly tried to do what Jack did so innocently. Their backs must have been turned, for the carriage passed in, and so did Jack, without any one's trying to stop him. He was as bold as a lion about it, because he did not know any better. A number of people were at the same time crowding through a narrower gateway at one side, and they may have distracted the attention of the gatemen.

"I'd just as lief go in at the wagon-gate," said Jack, and he did not notice that each one stopped and paid something before going through. Jack went on behind the carriage. The carriage crossed what seemed to Jack a kind of bridge housed over. Nobody but a boy straight from Crofield could have gone so far as that without suspecting something; but the carriage stopped behind a line of other vehicles, and Jack walked unconcernedly past them.

"Jingo!" he suddenly exclaimed. "What's this? I do believe the end of this street is moving!"

He bounded forward, much startled by a thing so strange and unaccountable, and in a moment more he was looking out upon a great expanse of water, dotted here and there with canal-boats, ships, and steamers.

"Mister," he asked excitedly of a little man leaning against a post, "what's this?"

"Have ye missed your way and got onto the wrong ferry-boat?" replied the little man gleefully. "I did it once myself. All right, my boy. You've got to go to Staten Island this time. Take it coolly."

"Ferry-boat?" said Jack. "Staten Island? I thought it was the end of the street, going into the Battery!"

"Oh, you're a greenhorn!" laughed the little man "Well, it won't hurt ye; only there's no boat back from the island, on Sunday, till after supper. I'll tell ye all about it. Where'd you come from?"

"From Crofield," said Jack, "and I got here only this morning."

The little man eyed him half-suspiciously for a moment, and then led him to the rail of the boat.

"Look back there," he said. "Yonder's the Battery. You ought to have kept on. It's too much for me how you ever got aboard of this 'ere boat without knowing it!" And he went on with a long string of explanations, of which Jack understood about half, with the help of what he recalled from his guide-book. All the while, however, they were having a sail across the beautiful bay, and little by little Jack made up his mind not to care.

"I've made a mistake and slipped right out of the city," he said to himself, "about as soon as I got in! But maybe I can slip back again this evening."

"About the greenest bumpkin I've seen for an age," thought the little man, as he stood and looked at Jack. "It'll take all sorts of blunders to teach him. He is younger than he looks, too. Anyway, this sail won't hurt him a bit."

That was precisely Jack's conclusion long before the swift voyage ended and he walked off the ferry-boat upon the solid ground of Staten Island.

CHAPTER XIV. FRIENDS AND ENEMIES.

When Jack Ogden left the Staten Island ferry-boat, he felt somewhat as if he had made an unexpected voyage to China, and perhaps might never return to his own country. It was late in the afternoon, and he had been told by the little man that the ferry-boat would wait an hour and a half before the return voyage.

"I won't lose sight of her," said Jack, thoughtfully. "No running around for me this time!"

He did not move about at all. He sat upon an old box, in front of a closed grocery store, near the ferry-house, deciding to watch and wait until the boat started.

"Dullest time I ever had!" he thought; "and it will cost me six cents to get back. You have to pay something everywhere you go. I wish that boat was ready to go now."

It was not ready, and it seemed as if it never would be; meanwhile the Crofield boy sat there on the box and studied the ferry-boat business. He had learned something of it from his guide-book, but he understood it all before the gates opened.

He had not learned much concerning any part of Staten Island, beyond what he already knew from the map; but shortly after he had paid his fare, he began to learn something about the bay and the lower end of New York.

"I'm glad to be on board again," he said, as he walked through the long cabin to the open deck forward. In a few minutes more he drew a long breath and exclaimed:

"She's starting! I know I'm on the right boat, too. But I'm hungry and I wish I had something to eat."

There was nothing to be had on board the boat, but, although hungry, Jack could see enough to keep him from thinking about it.

"It's all city; and all wharves and houses and steeples,—every way you look," he said. "I'm glad to have seen it from the outside, after all."

Jack stared, but did not say a word to anybody until the ferry-boat ran into its dock.

"If I only had a piece of pie and a cup of coffee!" Jack was thinking, as he walked along by the wharves, ashore. Then he caught sight of the smallest restaurant he had ever seen. It was a hand-cart with an awning over it, standing on a corner. A placard hanging from the awning read:

"Clams, one cent apiece; coffee, five cents a cup."

"That's plain enough!" exclaimed Jack. "She can't put on a cent more for anything."

A stout, black-eyed woman stood behind a kind of table, at the end of the cart; and on the table there were bottles of vinegar and pepper-sauce, some crackers, and a big tin coffee-heater.