Moses Shuder, having paid Saint Harvey of Riverbank his good money, went back to his own junkyard feeling high elation. The great ambition that had urged him ever since he had begun, a raw immigrant, was consummated. He was the mightiest Junk King of Riverbank. He need fear no paltry competition. He could put prices down and he could buy or refuse to buy, and he could put prices up, and no one would interfere. He saw himself the future great man of his people, bringing his downtrodden compatriots from Russia, sending them out upon the roads of free America to glean the waste metals and rags, setting them up in small trades, financing them, being a father to them. He had eliminated Harvey Redding.

But as he considered the transaction he began to worry. It is the duty of every man, in making a bargain, to make a good bargain—in fact, the best possible bargain—and Shuder began to fear he had not done that. Saint Harvey had accepted his offer almost too promptly.

His knowledge of values quieted this fear somewhat. The junk he had bought was worth more than he had paid for it, he knew, and the yard was worth more than one hundred dollars per year. Suddenly the awful thought came to him that, although he had paid Saint Harvey cash money, he had nothing to show for it. He had no “paper,” no receipt, no lease, nothing! Not even a witness! The cold perspiration oozed from his every pore. He had been cheated!

Moses Shuder, lying beside his soundly sleeping—and snoring—wife, squirmed with shame at the thought that he had been such a fool. He pulled at his beard angrily. So be it! He would find this Harvey Redding and make him give a paper. In the morning—

He suddenly sat bolt upright.

“Rosa, hush!” he whispered, putting his palm under her chin and closing her mouth.

“What is it, Moses? Fire? Thieves?”

“Hush! Thieves,” he whispered. He slid out of bed and drew on his trousers. From the lean-to where he kept his most precious junk—his copper and his lead—came the subdued clink of metal. Stealthily Shuder glided to his back door. He glided to the door of the lean-to.

“Thief! I got you!” he cried, and pounced upon Lem.

“You leave me alone! You let go of me!” the boy cried. But Shuder had him fast, and scolding in Yiddish he dragged the boy from the lean-to and into the shack.

Rosa lit the oil lamp.

“Sure!” panted Shuder. “Young Redink! Stealing chunk! Sure!”

Lem was in a panic. Fear, such as he had never experienced, cowed him. To the mind of youth the strange foreigner seems a thing to be jeered and hooted in the open day, but in the homes and churches and synagogues of the foreigners are believed to lurk strange mysteries; deep, unfathomable, blood-curdling, weird ways and doings, especially dire when wrought upon boys. Lem, in Shuder's grasp, did not see the poor shack with its grotesque furnishings rescued from purchases of offcast second-hand things. He did not see the tawdry intimate surroundings of a poor Jew struggling to wrest comfort and life from a none too friendly environment. Lem saw a perilous twilight in which might be worked strange tortures, awful incantations, black wizardry. Lem was scared stiff.

“Stealink!” said Shuder bitterly. The poor man was, indeed, almost in tears. His natural anger was all but lost in a feeling of hopelessness that he would ever be able to protect his property in this land of scorn.

“You should gif him by a policemans right avay,” said Rosa. “He should go to chail. Stealink at night!”

“Vait!” said Shuder, upraising his free hand. “Boy, vere is your fadder?”

“I don't know,” Lem whimpered. “How do I know where he is? He don't have to tell me, does he? You let me go, I tell you!”

“Should you tell me vere is your fadder, I let you go,” said Shuder. “Stop viggling. I don't hurt you. Why you steal my chunk?”

“I did n't steal it. I just took some.”

“Why?” Shuder insisted.

Lem looked up at the Jew.

“I won't tell,” he said.

“Then to chail!” said Shuder.

“Well—I wanted it,” said Lem reluctantly, and suddenly he broke down and began to ay. “I wanted to go to pop. I wanted to go to him. He said I could go where he is.”

“Rosa, hush!” said Shuder when his wife tried to speak again, and he began patiently, and with the little English he could command, to comfort Lem and let him know nothing dire was to happen to him.

Slowly, Lem's fear of some mysterious fate was lessened, and again and again he heard that Shuder, too, wished to find Saint Harvey. Not to harm him, Shuder assured Lem; only to get a “paper” that Saint Harvey had forgotten to leave. The importance of this paper to Shuder loomed vast as the Jew spoke of it again and again. In spite of his fear and hatred, Lem felt that the “paper” was something Shuder should not be robbed of—that it was some sort of Magna Charta of his life which Harvey had carried away by mistake.

“You won't get a policeman after me?” Lem begged.

“Sure, no! I gif you right by it. Sure, no!”

“Well, I ain't goin' to tell you. Pop he told me not to tell. But I can't help it if you go where I go, can I?”

“Nobody could,” said Shuder. “How could you?”

“Well, then, you let me go an' I'll go. I'll go right where he told me to, because that's what he said for me to do. And I can't help it if you follow me. Only you better get ready to walk a long ways, because it's sixty miles, I guess. Anyway, I guess it is.”

Shuder stroked his beard.

“Could a man go by the railroad?”

“Sure he could, if he had the money. Was n't that what I wanted some junk for—to sell it, so I could go on the train? But I have n't got any money. So I got to walk.”

“Mebby I should pay,” said Shuder.

Lem considered this.

“I guess that's all right,” he said, “if you want to. We'd get there sooner, anyway.”

Lem would not, however, tell where they were to go even then, and the next morning Shuder had to press close behind the boy at the ticket window to overhear him ask for a ticket to Burlington. He sat beside the boy all the way, too, never moving far from him even when they changed cars at the junction. At noon he fed Lem from the lunch Rosa had provided, and he bought Lem two apples from the train-boy. Shuder was close behind the boy when Lem asked at the post-office window for a letter for Lemuel Redding. Although he could not read, he peered over Lem's shoulder as Lem read the letter the clerk handed out.

“Pa ain't here no more,” said Lem, looking up at Shuder. “He's gone somewheres.”

Shuder grasped the letter from Lem's hand and stared at it, turning it over and over.

“Please, misder,” he begged of a man who passed, “you should read this to me.”

The man took the letter.

“Dear Lem,” he read. “I'm going on from here because the Jews have the junk business all tied up here from what I can see, and it's no place for me. No telling where I 'll land up at. You better go back to your Aunt Susan and wait until I send for you. Maybe it won't be as long as it looks like now.”

“And the name? The name?” cried Shuder. “Redding; it looks like Henry Redding, or something like that.”

“Well, I won't go back,” said Lem. “I don't care what he says. I won't go back to that old aunt. I don't care if I starve to death, I won't go back to her.”

Shuder had heard about Miss Susan on the way down from Riverbank, for Lem had been full of a sense of injustice and had had to talk to some one about it or burst. Lem and his troubles were none of Shuder's affair, but, on the other hand, Saint Harvey and the “paper” were, and Lem was Shuder's only link with Saint Harvey now.

“Do I ask you to go back by her, Lem'vel?” Shuder demanded. “No! But why should you vorry? Ain't I got two houses? Ain't I got two chunkyards? Ain't I got plenty room? I esk you, come by me awhile, Lem'vel.”

“Say, what you mean?” Lem asked. “You want me to go an' live at your house?”

“Sure!” said Shuder.

Lem looked at the Jew.

“All right,” he said. “Until I get a word from pop. I bet you don't have so many dishes to wash, anyway.”

Shuder raised a hand.

“Listen! Listen, Lem'vel!” he said solemnly. “I gif you my word you should n't wash even your face if you don't want to.”

“All right, I'll come,” said Lem.