Page:Ghost Stories v02n01 (1927 01).djvu/43

54 “There isn’t any thing to me at all! I'm worse than a jellyfish!”

An entire procession of men and women were now passing through his invisible body. He scarcely felt them, but a few succeeded in tickling him. One or two of the pedestrians apparently felt him; they shivered as if they had suddenly stepped into a cold shower.

“The streets are ghostly at night.” someone said at his left elbow, "I think it's safer to ride.”

Hazlitt determined to walk. He was miserable, but he had no desire to stand and mope. He started down the street. He was hatless and his hair streamed in the wind. He was a defiant ghost, but a miserable sense of futility gripped him. He was an outcast. He did not know where he would spend the night. He had no plans and no one to confide in. He couldn’t go to a hotel because he hadn’t even the ghost of money in his pockets, and of course no one could see him anyway.

Suddenly he saw a child standing in the very center of the street, and apparently unaware of the screaming traffic about him. An automobile driven by a young woman was almost on top of the boy before Hazlitt made up his mind to act.

He left the sidewalk in a bound and ran directly towards the automobile. He reached it a second before it touched the child, and with a great shove he sent the near-victim sprawling into a zone of safety. But he could not save himself. The fender of the car struck him violently in the chest; he was thrown forward, and the rear wheels passed over his body.

For a moment he suffered exquisite pain; a great weight pressed the breath from his thin body. He clenched his hands, and closed his eyes. The pain of this second death astonished him; it seemed interminable. But at length consciousness left him; his pain dissolved in a healing oblivion.

HE child picked himself up and began to cry. “Someone pushed me," he moaned. “I was looking at the lights and someone pushed me from behind."

The woman in the car was very pale. “I think I ran over someone," she said weakly. “I saw him for a moment when I tried to turn to the left. He was very thin and worn." She turned to those who had gathered near. “Where did you carry him to?" she asked.

They shook their heads. “We didn't see anyone, madam! You nearly got the kid though. Drivers like you should be hanged!"

A policeman roughly elbowed his way through the crowd that was fast gathering. “What’s all this about?" he asked. “Is anyone run over?"

The woman shook her head. “I don’t know. I think I ran over a tramp a poor, thin man he was the look in his eyes was terrible and very beautiful. I I saw him for a moment just before the car struck him. I think he wanted to die."

She turned again to the crowd. “Which of you carried him away?" she asked tremulously.

“She’s batty," said the policeman. “Get out of here you!" He advanced on the crowd and began dispersing them with his club.

The woman in the car leaned over and looked at the sidewalk, a puzzled, mystified expression on her pale features.

“No blood or anything,” she moaned. “I can’t understand it!" {{c|{{xxl|Kellie’s Christmas }}

{Continued from page 13) }} when I was four years old. In those days Murray Hill still retained its pristine glory as Manhattan's mid-town social centre. Only a scattering of shops had encroached. And the tall, grim loft buildings had not yet appeared to shut out the air and sunshine. Refinement, culture and quiet had not yet yielded to the demands of manufacture and trade, the kind which always brought squalor, dingy tenements, and rumbling trucks in its wake.

N that period the tenement in which Johnny and his mother lived was a proud, old house of ornate design, five stories in height and with a scrolled balcony of iron, stretching across its parlor floor.

And there had lived the Huntingtons, the universally beloved Archer Huntington, and his beautiful wife, Dolly. Archer had been a great shipping master and a financial power in The Street: a man of enormous wealth for those days. But, with all their material prosperity, the Huntington home had lacked the one thing to make it complete—a child.

One had come—a little boy. But he had been taken away before a year had passed. There had been no other. However, though childless, Archer and his wife had loved children with a passion which surpassed all other interests for them. Their home always was the playground for the little ones of their relatives and friends. And Dolly, despite the frail, little body which made her almost an invalid, went about daily into the homes along the waterfront looking after the needs of the children of the poorer families.

Archer backed her splendidly in these efforts. But his big days came with Christmas, when he could gather children about him to his heart’s content. The day before Christmas, in an old hall far down in the Bowery, he held open house for the youngsters of the city’s poor, where there was a gigantic tree ablaze with colored candles and long tables, heaped high with goodies; and ice cream and candy to follow.

However, it was after the feast when old Archer was truly in his element. For then, clad in scarlet cap and fur-trimmed coat, with shining boots that reached almost to his hips, he played Santa Claus, heaping toys into the arms of each eager child as it filed past him. And he looked the part. For he was short and stout, with a waistline that stretched the belt about his gaily colored doublet. And framing his laughing eyes and ruddy cheeks was a mass of snowy whiskers that made artificial disguise unnecessary.

In the evening, in his great stone mansion just off the avenue, there would be another celebration—a splendid Christmas Eve party, to which would flock the children of his friends. And again he would play Saint Nick, and help happy Dolly distribute the creams and favors and pass about the presents, taken from a glittering tree, with each little one’s name written upon the wrapper.

And it was at Santa Claus Huntington's that I attended my first Christmas party. I was an excited, wide-eyed little miss whose great hope was fulfilled when Santa Claus Huntington himself gave me a big doll with flaxen hair that could say “mamma."

OWEVER, that was my only party there. For, the following summer Archer and his wife steamed away in a yacht for ports in the South Seas, where it was hoped the warmer breezes would restore the roses to Dolly's cheeks. But the yacht never reached its destination. And though my father, Archer’s life-long friend and business associate, conducted a world-wide search for it, neither the boat nor its passengers were ever heard of again.

My father, as well as others of Archer's intimates, knew that, somewhere in the house, he always kept a considerable store of ready cash for emergencies—such as his own and Dolly’s charities, or to aid less prosperous friends in need of loans, for which no papers would be signed or interest exacted. This hiding place, known only to him, was hunted for repeatedly, but never uncovered.

Then followed long years in which the old house remained closed and its windows boarded up. The neighborhood changed. Ugly business structures elbowed their way in. Workmen descended upon the old houses that remained, altering them inside and out, dividing the great rooms into smaller ones—making them over into beehives for humans. And into these tenements moved those who were compelled to count their pennies—the overflow of the poor from Five Points, Hell's Kitchen and Mulberry Bend.

Finally the Huntington estate was disposed of. My father purchased the old house, hoping, for sentimental reasons, to rent it as it stood, thereby preserving its outward appearance at least. But he had failed in that objective. No one wanted a whole house in that teeming tenement district. So, though my father continued his ownership, he permitted it, like its neighbors, to be rebuilt into small flats.

In those years my mother had died, leaving only me to care for Dad. But,