Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/213

 sun all day and a stifling sluggishness of exhausted air all night; and Don dragged himself from office to office—in his heavy clothing, in his sun-greened felt hat, in his burning winter shoes—pale and spiritless. Everyone in the city seemed to be short-tempered; the motormen of the cable cars, in their hot uniforms, stamped on the ringers of their gongs; the drivers lashed their horses with whips that cracked angrily in the fierce light; the crowds on the sidewalks pushed and fretted under the scant shade of shop-front awnings. It was the time of year when the police records of spring suicides begin to fall off, and the tenement house murders take their places on the sergeants' "blotters."

Don went. Jostled and elbowed, up Broadway to Madison Square, drawn by the sight of green leaves ahead of him. The working world no longer contented itself with merely ignoring him; it had turned on him irritably and shouldered him out of its way into the gutter. He stopped at a print-shop window attracted by a snow scene that reminded him of Canada—a picture of a dejected wolf on a hill-top looking down, over the drifts, on a little village with lighted windows, the smoke of kitchen chimneys rising straight and still in the frozen air. And Don understood the sneaking droop of that wolf's lean shoulders, and sympathized with it.

He crossed to the benches under the trees, to sit among the flotsam of the streets, among the idlers and vagabonds who gather into these stagnant pools of Broadway traffic. He turned his back on the activities of the pavement and the sight of all those fortunate