A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill

								

outstretched arm of welcome.
“He says,” interposed the ever-ready Skeeter, as his companion made
queer noises in his throat, “that he never knowed it was you. He never
went to trip you up. Honest to goodness! You ain't mad, are you?”
“No, I ain't mad.” Myrtella still smiled as she brushed the dust from
her skirt. “Here's a orange I brought you, Chick. You ain't been sick,
have you?”
“Naw! He ain't been sick, but he took that bath you ast him to, and
where's his nickel at?”
Myrtella stood and watched the boys until the corner grocery swallowed
them and their new nickel, then she sighed and turned into Bean Alley.
There were no streets here, and an occasional rock or tin can were the
only islands in a sea of mud. The Flathers' cottage, consisting of two
rooms and a half attic, rested its weight against the cottage next it,
with something of the blind reliance that Phineas Flathers rested upon
the Church. On its other side it commanded an uninterrupted view of the
Dump Heap, which was the background for all the juvenile social life of
that section of Billy-goat Hill.
Here ships were launched in mud puddles, flower gardens attempted in
tin cans, and fierce wars waged between rival gangs; here embryo mothers
played with stick and rag dolls, and aspirants for the circus performed
acrobatic feats on the one bit of fence that had not tumbled down. And
all this activity went on almost under the wheels of the dump carts that
passed to and fro all day. Myrtella, picking her way through the mud,
was just turning the corner of the Flathers' house when her eyes fell
upon a broken window-pane stuffed with a woolen skirt which she had
given to Maria to make over into trousers for Chick. She promptly jerked
it out with a force that brought the glass with it, and by the time she
reached the back door, her jaw was set and her brows knit.
Considering the fact that the rear room was a composite kitchen,
laundry, dining-room, pantry, coal house and cellar, the glances with
which Myrtella swept the chamber and its one occupant, might have been
a trifle less severe. It was a glance in which her individual abhorrence
of dirt combined with her racial disapproval of “in-laws.”
In the one space in the room that was not preempted, Maria Flathers bent
above a wash tub, feebly persuading black garments to become gray.
That was all she asked of them. She was not ambitious. Ambition, like
everything else, had been soaked out of her long ago by those hot,
steaming suds that enveloped her the greater part of her waking hours,
and left her physically, mentally, and morally limp. Her one strong
instinct was motherhood; but five little Flathers, opening feeble
eyes on their future environment, had become so discouraged that they
promptly closed them again. It was as if they really could not stand the
prospect of life in that home with Mr. and Mrs. Flathers for parents!
Only Chick survived, the ash-barrel baby, who really was not theirs