That night, before they got around, some
boys playing with a truck in the lots ran it down into one of the
cellar holes spoken of and were crushed under it, and so put a
point upon the matter that took the laughter out of it for good.
They went ahead with the park then.
When they had laid the sod, and I came and walked on it in defiance
of the sign to "keep off the grass," I was whacked by a policeman
for doing it, as I told in the "Ten Years' War." [Footnote: Now,
"The Battle with the Slum."] But that was all right. We had the
park. And I had been "moved on" before when I sat and shivered in
reeking hallways in that very spot, alone and forlorn in the long
ago; so that I did not mind. The children who were dancing there in
the sunlight were to have a better time, please God! We had given
them their lost chance. Looking at them in their delight now, it
is not hard to understand what happened: the place that had been
redolent of crime and murder became the most orderly in the city.
When the last house was torn down in the Bend, I counted seventeen
murders in the block all the details of which I remembered.
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