Page:The New Negro.pdf/113

Rh over a cheap suitcase of imitation leather. A vile-looking stogie fell in the aisle.

“God! Your feet're bigger'n Bills's.”

The crowd laughed uproariously. The butt of this joke grinned and showed a set of dirty nicotine-stained teeth. He recovered his balance in time to save the flaring match. He was a tremendous man, slightly stooped, with taffy-colored, straggling hair and little pig eyes.

Between initial puffs he drawled: “Now you're barkin' up the wrong tree. I only wear elevens.”

“Git off'n me, Lee Cromarty,” growled Bill. “You hadn't ought to be rumlin' of my feathers the wrong way—and you a-plannin' to ride the goat.”

Lake, a consumptive appearing, undersized, bovine-eyed individual, spat out the remark: “Naow, there! You had better be kereful. Men have been nailed to the cross for less than that.”

“Ha! ha!—ho! ho! ho!”

There was a joke to arouse the temper of the crowd.

A baby began to cry lustily in the rear and more commodious end of the car reserved for nonsmokers. His infantine wailing smote in sharp contrast upon the ears of the hilarious joshers, filling the silence that followed the subsidence of the laughter.

“Taci, bimba. Non aver paura!”

Nobody understood the musical words of the patient, Madonna-eyed Italian mother, not even the baby, for it continued its yelling. She opened her gay-colored shirt waist and pressed the child to her bosom. He was quieted.

"She can't speak United States, but I bet her Tony Spaghetti votes the same as you an' me. The young 'un 'll have more to say about the future of these United States than your children an' mine unless we carry forward the work such as we are going to accomplish to-night.”

"Yeh, you're damned right,” answered the scowling companion of the lynx-eyed citizen in khaki clothes, who had thus commented upon the foreign woman's offspring.

“They breed like cats. They'll outnumber us, unless—"