The Mystery of the Blinking Eye

you, Dan?”
    Dan laughed. “My budget didn’t run to cabs when I lived in the city—my budget required making use of my own two feet.”
    “You must have had a wonderful life, turned loose in New York,” Ned said with obvious envy.
    “It wasn’t what you might think. An orphan on the streets is not a person for anyone to envy, no matter who he is. Life wasn’t too bad when my mother was alive. We were poor, but I don’t remember minding that at all. After my mom died, it was difficult until my uncle showed up and took me to Sleepyside. Now I have friends like the Bob-Whites. I don’t think I’ll ever get over wondering why they let me into their club.... I sure did get in with a bad bunch of kids here in the city. I never want to see any of them again. They’re down around the Bowery and the waterfront. I never think of them except when someone brings it up, like right now.... No, I didn’t like being turned loose in New York, Ned. I’ll settle for a few strings tied to me.”
    , Everyone was quiet for a while. Then Brian said, “If we’re going for a ride in the park, we’d better collect the hansom cabs. Come on, Jim. They’ll be down on the Fifty-ninth Street Plaza.”
    While the boys were gone, everyone else helped wash the dishes and make the beds. Then Trixie telephoned her mother. Her younger brother, Bobby, age six, answered.
    “Moms is out in the garden watering her flowers,” he reported. “Mrs. Wheeler and Di’s mother are with her. They came here for coffee this morning. Trixie, did you go to the toy store yet?”
    “No, Bobby, I didn’t,” Trixie replied, smiling to herself. “We’ll save that, probably, for someday when you’re with us. Will you please call Moms in from the yard so I can talk with her?”
    “I will if you say hello to Reddy first. Here he is.”
    “Arf! Arf!” Bobby’s big red setter barked.
    Then Trixie’s mother answered. Trixie’s words tumbled over one another in her haste to tell her mother about the fun they were having in New York.
    “Barbara wants to say hello to you,” Trixie finished up after a while. “Then Honey wants to talk to her mother, and Di wants to talk to Mrs. Lynch.”
    The others were still talking when the boys came back with the cabs. “We have to go now,” Trixie said hastily. “The boys have brought the cabs. Moms, I wish you could see them. I’m looking at them right now, down on the street below. The drivers have tall black silk hats. Oh, it’s going to be such fun! Goodbye now.”
    Laughing and chattering, the young people crowded into the cabs, and the drivers lightly touched their whips to the flanks of their horses, turned around, and followed the edge of the park to the Seventy-second Street entrance.

A Treacherous Trip ● 4

    IN THE PARK the sun was shining, and the morning air was cool. Children played. Mothers strolled with babies in carriages. Pigeons were everywhere, strutting around on their pink feet, making contented plouplou sounds in their throats.
    The hansom cabs skirted the big lake, which was alive with rowboats carrying families—mothers, fathers, children. Back of the rowboats, children trailed paper boats on strings. One boy had made a flotilla of little aluminum foil boats, and the sun, glinting through the trees, turned them to fairy ships.
    It was quiet in the park. The hansom drivers kept up a constant flow of information, and, since the two cabs kept close together, the passengers talked back and forth, exchanging impressions of the park.
    One of the drivers, the older one, a round-faced white-haired gentleman, had been driving a hansom cab for years. “I used to drive for Mrs. Andrew Carnegie,” he told his group proudly.
    The other driver snorted. “Don’t believe a word of it,” he said hotly. “He’s driven that selfsame cab since Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from the Indians.”
    “I’m not that big a liar,” the old Irishman replied. “But I did drive the old lady herself. She was a great old lady, and she loved the park. She’d always wait for me. She liked everybody. Every year she had red geraniums planted in front of her house up there on Ninety-first Street.” He pointed north with the tip of his whip. “She did it so that people who rode the buses could see them.”
    Clop. Clop. Clop. Clop. The patient horses traveled along.
    “How big is Central Park?” Barbara asked. “It seems almost as big as the whole city of Des Moines.”
    “Eight hundred and forty