Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1906-01-13
Written for The Star.


During the gale the tug Bbenezer Grimm
| ran into the Horseshoe in distress and re-
ported that she had been forced to aban-
| don her tow, municipal garbage scow No.
| LA with two men aboard. just before
midnight dispatch from the Rockawsy
Beach life saving station announced that
enc survivor had been taken off half a mile
south of the shoals by an oyster sloop."
This paragraph was one of a dozen under
the heading Minor Happenings of the
Storm" that followed the big storm
| spread in the morning paper.
If anybody had found time or inclination
to hunt out all the details of the story he
wouldn't have found much-just two I'M
known Italians, very ignorant and still
more dirty, lost for day on the Atlantic
| ocean, and one snatched away from the
waters barely in time. That's all.
Yet in the working out of their fate there
were complex emotions[oye of woman,
rum, greed, selfishness cruelty and pluck
all the things that make men do anything
| from building empires to trimming garbage
ScowS.
The story has neither plot nor romance
| It's only a very human yarn, without any
| particular ending, in which it is like a
| whole lot of human beings.
The Tug Ebenezer Grimm.
nc LUZ IADcAeStE SIiIllil was a marine
specimen of the reduced aristocrat. Once
she had lorded it down Chesapeake way
and then she was too good to attend any
thing except passenger liners Patched
| tramps and eoastwse schooners might Sig
nal to her. raging, in vain. But she had
gone through her stages of decay like a
thing of the land Now, cheaply painted
with oft-repaired engines secondhand
propeller and crusted boilers that some
times awed even her Alphabetically reckless
engineer, she was towing garbage scoWs in
New York harbor and glad to have the
berth.
Towing garbage scows to sea to dump
them is business neither fragrant nor
profitable. The Ebenezer Grimm5s cantain
mad worked down to 1t like his tGIg-from A
Wrathfui, communicating harbor king
through successive stages, which comprised
many things almost as mysterious as the
composition of the neatly trimmed load
that ne was taking to sea in this cold
brooding January dawn.
ms nationality was New York, and that
IS not American or anything else recognized
under a flag. His grandfather had been
eerman, his grandmother Irish; their son.
fls father, had married an East Side Rus
san JeWess- BY this time his name had
hecome cowler. Originally it had been
Kcehler
This conglomerate native without coun-
| try leaned moodily in the window of the
| been drunk all night and he was drunk
sun, but 1t was fading away to his regret
Below, his Scandinavian engineer and the
trench-Canadfan deck hand were nursing
heacaches acquired at the same time as
the captains.
Astern, smashing into the waves with her
square bow, swan the scow. Two men with
theli narrow coat collars turned up hun
grly walked up and down In the small
space left bare behind the piled refuse OF
the big town. II smelled to the wintry
clouds, but Giuseppe of Sardinia and Felipe
of Calabria ate black bread and garlic
mass.
Where They Get Their Clothes.
They didn't mind. The very coats they
wore had been trimmed out of the gar
bage. Out of the tons that came slipping
down greasy shutes on top of them ali
Gay where they. worked in the pestilentiaI
scoWs they had gathered the shoes that
they wore, the shirts that graced them, the
hats that decked them, and even the bed
ding on which they slept, when they were
not victims of the superior attractions OF
Mulberry streets stale beer dives
Giuseppe and Felipe had headaches. too.
Ihey harbored designs on each other also
AS they walked up and down, they passed
with elaborate precautions against touch
Ing. Every little while one or the other
of them felt slyly to make sure that his
knife was in the right place.
They had been fairly good friends once.
Early in their American careers they had
even been bed-mates, sharing a snug nest
of municipal fiotsam and jetsam under the
pieI where the garbage dump stretched its
sbeltering arms. There with fellow irnml-
grants they had dweIled, fighting for a
footing with Norway rats and New York
river thieves, drinking stale beer and live
whisky from tomato cans at night and
otherwise preparing themselves for the
of niGiT1 into
iigent suffrage
Then had come the first step In educa-
tien. which taught them that the padrone
held his contract for trimming the scows
Only by virtue of his work in other mat
tiers OF trimming. such as trimming votes.
So Giuseppe and Felipe Joined his club
and removed triumphantly from the breezy
parlorS" under the cTibWork of the pier
to a heightened establishment in Bayard
street, where they became dodgers of
prosperous family of compatriots who had
ar elegant suite of two rooms, one or
which was almost not dark. The family
consisted of five. and there were two other
lodsers. But by crowding a little, 1t was
inGeed of an ease, look you, signore, that
IL Is we can give unto you whole corner
1t was, indeed, magnificently sufficient.
There was a black-eyed signorina how
ever. She was not particularly large but
before long she made the corner impossible
as lodging for those two
And on the previous evening she had
made Felipes continued life impossible so
far as Giuseppe was concerned, and fiui-
seppe's so far as Felipe was concerned.
Felipe, unknown to Giuseppe had seen
him kiss the signorina; and Giuseppe, ua-
known to Felipe, had seen him do the
same.
Bided Their Time.
In the early days, before they were poiisi-
cal factors, they would have settled II
swiftly with a stab each. But they had
learned that New York has amazing curious
views on private vengeance and offers no
strongholds of hills for killers. So they
bided their time.
Neither of them had even faint inten-
ton of hurrying that time by fighting on
the scow. They had too much respect tor
the remote and mighty men on the tug
boat ahead, who roared unknown things
and laid around them with red fists ana
lumber and iron pins. They viewed these
as they viewed the policeman on the land
as strange, ineomprehensible figures. be-
hind whom cape the square black entrances
to jails and hospitals.
The Ebenezer Grimm was slow and her
owners kept her on a starvation diet OF
coal The laden scow towed hard, and
Capt. Cowler let her have all the hawser
he had. till she played at the end of 500
feet of manila cable, most OF which was