But the alderman stuck to his story, and it was true,
because the hypnotized bandit told me privately all about it when I took
him down to Joliet.
* * * * *
"I will try," said Sergt. Kuzick, "to think of something for you in about
a week. I begin to get a pretty definite idea what you want, and I'll talk
it over with old Jim, who used to travel beat with me. He's a great one
for stories, old Jim is. A man tan hardly think of them offhand like. You
give me a week." And the old sergeant sank into his wooden chair and gazed
out of the dusty station window with a perplexed and baffled eye.
DEAD WARRIOR
Do you want to see the dead warriors come back, the fallen army come back,
crawling out of its million coffins and walking back across the sea and
across the prairie; the waxen face of youth come out of its million graves
and its uniform hanging from its limp frame? Do you want to see the war
dead, the young ones ripped to pieces in the trenches standing like tired
beggars at your back door, dead hands and dead eyes and wailing softly: "I
was so young. I died so soon. All of us from all the countries who died so
soon, we grow lonely on the other side. Ah, my unlived days! My uneaten
bread! My uncounted years! They lie in a little corner and nobody comes to
them!"
It's a Jewish play called "The Dead Man" and every night in Glickman's
Palace Theater on Blue Island Avenue a thousand men and women sit with
staring eyes and watch this figure in its grave-clothes come dragging back
like a tired beggar, come moaning back with the cry: "My unlived days! My
uneaten bread! My uncounted years!"
He stands between Hamlet and Peer Gynt, this strangely motionless one who
has thrown the west side into an uproar.
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