The Yellow Kid’s corner, by common understanding, is at Broadway and Warren where the omnibuses stop at the park and you can sell to the top-hat crowd heading for the Astor Hotel, with Graub’s restaurant, where the builders go if they haven’t brought their lunch, on one side of Warren and Donnegan’s, which is the reporters’ favorite gin mill, on the other. A hell of a location. But because today there is WAR! he can make a quick run through City Hall Plaza with the horse trolleys turning around and the noise and the dust and the drays pulling up with stone for the new buildings or the new bridge over to Brooklyn to the east and the Tammany hacks and city clerks coming and going and boys hawking the Journal and the Sun and the World and the Times and the Herald and the Trib and the Telegram and the Telegraph and the Daily News and the Mail and Express and the Star and even one poor clueless little street rat trying to pawn off day-old copies of the Weekly Post, just don’t stop moving and there’s no trespass, before he takes up position on his own spot.
“WAR!” he hollers. “Special edition, Congress Declares WAR! Only in the Journal!”
It isn’t only in the Journal, of course, at least he doesn’t think so, but the geezers don’t know that yet, do they?
Nobody muscles you off your spot, the place that is understood to be yours by the Unwritten Law. The one time somebody tried with him, big stupid spaghetti-bender wearing a different color shoe on each foot, thought just cause the Kid is sick-looking and little and skinny he’ll roll over easy, he sold maybe three papers before the Kid come back with a brick in each hand and half the newsies below Canal Street to teach him how it works. The wop tried to run but they caught him and knocked the stuffing out of him till he just rolled into a ball on the cobblestones and then they all pissed on him.
The Yellow Kid took the spot over from Dink Healy when Dink got too big and switched over to the Western Union, working as his striker for halvsies the first year, buying the corner a nickel a day. Dink has the glimmer that don’t focus right and was maybe a little scary toward the end when he got tall, so the Yellow Kid would sell most of his bundle.
“You look like death on a friggin soda cracker,” Dink would always say, tugging the Kid’s cap down over his eyes. “I couldn’t have a better striker if you was crippled.”
“Read about the WAR!” hollers the Yellow Kid. Some of the builders coming out of Graub’s buy on their way back to work, then he tries Don-negan’s but the joint is empty.
“Haven’t seen em all day,” calls Sweeny from behind the counter. “They’re all at work, poor miserable bastids, slapping together them extras.”
The Yellow Kid sells out to a mick priest heading for St. Paul’s and hotfoots it as fast as he can go back to the Journal building.
“You get the last dozen,” says Specs, jerking his nose at the pallet.
“When’s the next run?”
“Sposed to be out at three o’clock. All new headers.”
The Kid buys the dozen and heads up Centre Street. “WAR!” he cries. “Spanish Invasion Plans, this issue!”
He does a circuit around the Tombs and the Criminal Courts Building, always good for a few sales to the turnkeys, got nothing to do but sit on their keisters, pick their noses, and read. He unloads two under the Bridge of Sighs on the Franklin Street side, then stops in front of the Bummer’s Hall and looks up from where Maminka brought him to wave up at the windows the first time Janek got pinched. The food was lousy in the Tombs, said Janek, but Alderman Burke from Tammany treated him to steak and spuds the day they sprung him.
There is a horse trolley running up Broadway that the Kid manages to catch up to, hauling himself aboard as it rolls and hollering his way up the aisle to the front.
“WAR!” he cries. “Spanish Fleet Sighted in East River!”
He sells all but one, hands it to the conductor before the old grouch can lay a collar on him. “Read all about it,” he says, then ducks under the man’s arm and leaps off the moving trolley in front of Blatnik’s.
The working stiffs have fed their faces and gone back to their stalls so now it is only newsies who have peddled their morning bundle at the counter — Nub Riley and Beans and Ikey and Chezz DiMucci and Yid Slivovitz. The Kid grabs a stool and shouts for his burger and pie and a chocolate fizzer which Yid likes to call an egg cream though they don’t put neither egg nor cream in the thing.
“About friggin time with this WAR!” says Nub, who is a fiend for red-hots and always has two, one with onions and one with pickle relish, laid on thick. “I mean shit or get off the friggin pot.”
“This is gonna be big,” says Ikey, pushing the scoop of vanilla under the surface of his root beer with the spoon. “You remember how we sold when they sprang the Señorita?”
“That was only the Journal.”
“So? This’ll be good for everybody.”
The Journal made a big deal out of this beautiful Cuban Señorita the Spanish bastids had violated and tortured and locked up in a dungeon in Havana, got the Women of America to write letters to their king or queen or whatever they got over there, then finally lost patience and sent their own guy, just a scribbler, down to spring her out of the joint with a ladder and some men’s clothes for disguise. Boy Willie hogged the headlines for a week.
“Well it’s a damn sight better than that Cross of Silver malarkey they were floggin. Jesus, Mary, an Joseph, how’s a guy spose to sell papers, they can’t make up better news than that?”
“You at least need a society dame floatin in the river. Or a riot where the Army gets to blast away—”
“Like that Pullman strike.”
“Okay for a week,” says Chezz DiMucci. “But them labor things burn out quick.”
“What about that Coxey’s Army circus?” says Beans.
“Or Dr. Holmes who croaked all the people in Chicago?” says Yid Slivovitz.