He ceased, also, to think of the soul he had
been trying so earnestly to save. He thought instead of the tender
weight against his shoulder, of the heavy lashes that lay on the
tear-stained cheeks so close to his, of the soft, white brow under his
rough, brown fingers. Something older than love or religion was making
its claim on Dan.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE PRICE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
It was November of the following year that the bird of ill-omen,
which had been flapping its wings over Calvary Alley for so long,
decided definitely to alight. A catastrophe occurred that threatened
to remove the entire population of the alley to another and, we
trust, a fairer world.
Mrs. Snawdor insists to this day that it was the sanitary inspector who
started the trouble. On one of his infrequent rounds he had encountered a
strange odor in Number One, a suspicious, musty odor that refused to come
under the classification of krout, kerosene, or herring. The tenants, in
a united body, indignantly defended the smell.
"It ain't nothin' at all but Mis' Smelts' garbage," Mrs. Snawdor
declared vehemently. "She often chucks it in a hole in the kitchen floor
to save steps. Anybody'd think the way you was carryin' on, it was a
murdered corpse!"
But the inspector persisted in his investigations, forcing a way into the
belligerent Snawdor camp, where he found Fidy Yager with a well-developed
case of smallpox. She had been down with what was thought to be
chicken-pox for a week, but the other children had been sworn to secrecy
under the threat that the doctor would scrape the skin off their arms
with a knife if they as much as mentioned Fidy's name.
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