“Tell your mother next time not to make your bundles so heavy. Let you make two turns. Neither of you are strong enough for that load.”
The janitor proved to be an old acquaintance—this being my third or fourth call on the dogs in her house. She was a gossipy Italian woman, and since she last saw me many things of importance to her had happened. She insisted on my coming in and sitting down.
After inspecting her new baby and admiring the photograph of her brother in an Italian uniform, among other subjects I chanced to mention was the hope that she would not allow her little girls to tote huge bundles of wash across roofs. I then told of the two children who had passed me in the hall.
“Jesus!” she exclaimed excitedly. “They break in Angelina’s flat last week and stole all her fine clothes. Day before they break in a flat on the avenue and steal a man’s watch.”
The story in a nutshell was that the two children had, within six days, entered and robbed two flats. When I saw them they were evidently escaping with plunder from a third.
“I tell my man,” the janitor added, after giving me the details of the two robberies, “he must get my dog license. My dog more use than the police. What the police do for me?—way down on the street—my dog he stay here. When I go I tell him: ‘You stay.’ Nobody come in when my dog’s here.”
Later I heard of these two girl robbers at least a dozen times. According to later reports they had annexed, or been annexed by, two young men. One report was to the effect that the parents of one of them had taken the matter up with the police in the hope of finding their child and inducing her to return home.
In some of the best built and cared for tenement-houses in that section of my district, there was not a door that had not been jimmied. Janitor and tenants agreed that most of this was done by boys, scarcely more than children. They also agreed that a dog was the best and only protection against these thieves.
Crossing the back yard on my way to a rear tenement in the lower gas-house district, I once noticed a lot of writing on a fence. It was in chalk, and had the appearance of being freshly done.
“Mary will go too” and “Seen you was” were two sentences that attracted my attention.