Donald Patrick Dorgan had served forty-four
years on the police force of Northernapolis, and during all but
five of that time he had patrolled the Forest Park section.
Don Dorgan might have been a sergeant, or even a captain,
but it had early been seen at headquarters that he was a crank
about Forest Park. For hither he had brought his young wife, and
here he had built their shack; here his wife had died, and here she
was buried. It was so great a relief in the whirl of department
politics to have a man who was contented with his job that the Big
Fellows were glad of Dorgan, and kept him there where he wanted to
be, year after year, patrolling Forest Park.
For Don Pat Dorgan had the immense gift of loving people,
all people. In a day before anyone in Northernapolis had heard of
scientific criminology, Dorgan believed that the duty of a
policeman with clean gloves and a clean heart was to keep people
from needing to be arrested. He argued with drunken men and
persuaded them to hide out in an alley and sleep off the drunk.
When he did arrest them it was because they were sedately
staggering home intent on beating up the wives of their bosoms. Any
homeless man could get a nickel from Dorgan and a road-map of the
doss-houses. To big bruisers he spoke slowly, and he beat them with
his nightstick where it would hurt the most but injure the least.
Along his beat, small boys might play baseball, provided they did
not break windows or get themselves in front of motor cars. The
pocket in his coat-tail was a mine; here were secreted not only his
midnight sandwiches, his revolver and handcuffs and a comic
supplement, but also a bag of striped candy and a red rubber ball.
When the Widow Maclester's son took to the booze, it was
Don Dorgan who made him enlist in the navy. Such things were Don's
work-his art. Joy of his art he had when Kitty Silva repented and
became clean-living; when Micky Connors, whom Dorgan had known ever
since Micky was a squawking orphan, became a doctor, with a large
glass sign lettered J. J. Connors, M.D., and a nurse to let a poor
man in to see the great Doctor Connors!
Dorgan did have for one boy and girl a sneaking fondness
that transcended the kindliness he felt toward the others. They
were Polo Magenta, son of the Italian-English-Danish jockey who had
died of the coke, and Effie Kugler, daughter of that Jewish
delicatessen man who knew more of the Talmud than any man in the
Ghetto-Effie the pretty and plump, black-haired and quick-eyed, a
perfect armful for anyone.
Polo Magenta had the stuff of a man in him. The boy
worshiped motors as his father had worshiped horses. At fourteen,
when his father died, he was washer at McManus' Garage; at eighteen
he was one of the smoothest taxi-drivers in the city. At nineteen,
dropping into Kugler's Delicatessen for sausages and crackers for
his midnight lunch, he was waited upon by Effie.
Thereafter he hung about the little shop nightly, till old
Kugler frowned upon them-upon Polo, the gallantest lad in Little
Hell, supple in his chauffeur's uniform, straight-backed as the
English sergeant who had been his grandfather, pale-haired like a
Dane, altogether a soldierly figure, whispering across the counter
to blushing Effie.
Kugler lurked at the door and prevented Polo from driving
past and picking her up. So Effie became pale with longing to see
her boy; Polo took to straight Bourbon, which is not good for a
taxi-driver racing to catch trains. He had an accident, once; he
merely smashed the fenders of another car; but one more of the
like, and the taxi-company would let him out.
Then Patrolman Don Dorgan sat in on the game. He decided
that Polo Magenta should marry Effie. He told Polo that he would
bear a message from him to the girl, and while he was meticulously
selecting a cut of sausage for sandwich, he whispered to her that
Polo was waiting, with his car, in the alley off Minnis Place.
Aloud he bawled: "Come walk the block with me, Effie, you little
divvle, if your father will let you. Mr. Kugler, it isn't often
that Don Dorgan invites the ladies to go a-walking with him, but
it's spring, and you know how it is with us wicked cops. The girl
looks as if she needed a breath of fresh air."
"That's r-r-r-right," said Kugler. "You go valk a block
with Mr. Dorgan, Effie, and mind you come r-r-r-right back."
Dorgan stood like a lion at the mouth of the alley where,
beside his taxi, Polo Magenta was waiting. As he caught the cry
with which Effie came to her lover, he remembered the evenings long
gone when he and his own sweetheart had met in the maple lane that
was now the scrofulous Minnis Place.
"Oh, Polo, I've just felt dead, never seeing you nowhere."
"Gee, it hurts, kid, to get up in the morning and have
everything empty, knowing I won't see you any time. I could run the
machine off the Boulevard and end everything, my heart's so cold
without you."
"Oh, is it, Polo, is it really?"
"Say, we only got a couple minutes. I've got a look in on a
partnership in a repair shop in Thornwood Addition. If I can swing
it, we can beat it and get hitched, and when your old man sees I'm
prospering-"
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