Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/193

181 he took them between his knees and drew, the cases on them like stockings. The pillow-shams he spread on the wash-stand and dressing-table.

By four o'clock he had the forty pieces of tinware arranged on hooks around the kitchen, and the agateware kettle, filled with water, set on the gas-stove. It was then he found that there was no gas in the pipes; but the janitor, frantically summoned, led him to the meter in the bathroom—"quarter-in-the-slot" tenement-house meter—made change of a dollar for him, and showed him how to put his money in. The rest was a matter of hanging the curtains and the chromes in the front room. Carney shook his head doubtfully at one of the latter—a picture of a yellow horse dragging a sleigh-load of wood up a forest road in a snow-storm. "Darn mut," he said. "He 'd ought t' 've had a team fer that haul."

But the crowning audacity of his day was the purchase of a delicatessen dinner—cold chicken, sweet pickles, potato salad, Swiss cheese, bologna, rye bread, a wooden plate of butter, and four bottles of imported English ale. He spread it on the table, in the dishes of the "decorated English tea-set," drew up two chairs, and surveyed his work from the doorway with a chuckle of uncontainable delight.

If Mrs. Carney had been a bride out of a romance, she might have entered that flat in the most adorable ecstasies of appreciation. But, unfortunately for