After a
minute of this I'm darned if the whole bunch didn't scatter out and
begin to tear up the pavement along the car-track on this cross street.
Ben tripped back to us looking cheerful once more.
"They wouldn't sell me the car," he says, "so I'm going to take back a
bunch of the dear old rails. They'll be something to remind me of the
dead past. Just think! I rode over those very rails when I was a tot."
We was all kind of took back at this, and I promptly warned Ben that
we'd better beat it before we got pinched. But Ben is confident. He says
no crime could be safer in New York than setting a bunch of Italians to
tearing up a street-car track; that no one could ever possibly suspect
it wasn't all right, though he might have to be underhanded to some
extent in getting his souvenir rails hauled off. He said he had told the
foreman that he was the contractor's brother and had been sent with this
new order and the foreman had naturally believed it, Ben looking like a
rich contractor himself.
And there they was at work, busy as beavers, gouging up the very last
remnant of little old New York when it was that.
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