Morris Steiner is a bad boy and Morris Steiner is a good boy, and whichever he is most Magistrate Naumer in the Flatbush Court, Brooklyn, must soon decide.
Morris, now in Raymond Street Jail, says he will not live with his stepmother. He braved hunger and privation because of this idea. He built himself a hut, lived a queer gypsy life for weeks, cooked his own meals and slept in his queer camp. He did his own washing and cooking. And, curious boy that he is, he did his own praying, which was that his own mother would forgive him for running away, and would come to him as he slept and kiss his forehead. That, he says, was the prayer he made in his hut.
Morris, who is sixteen years old, could never get along with his stepmother. He has a brother eighteen years old and another fourteen, and they live on good terms with their stepmother. It was nine years ago that the brisk little woman married Aaron Steiner, a travelling salesman. He was a widower with four children.
The Steiners have not only a comfortable but a pretty home at No. 991 Sixtieth street, Brooklyn. It possesses shade trees and carefully trimmed hedges and a beflowered piazza. Mrs. Steiner said to a World reporter there yesterday:
“Such a queer boy! This home is not for him. He will not have it because I am his stepmother. From the time he was seven years old he would hardly speak to his father, because I had come to the home. My other stepchildren love me. But he will not. I could not pet him. He would shrink from me. Or he would laugh. I thought all the time that when he got older it would be all right. But it was not. The older he got the less he would think of this as his home. He would always run away.”
This habit of the boy brought him into the Flatbush Court yesterday on a charge of being incorrigible.
When the boy disappeared the last time he made his way to a spot about half a mile from his home. It is in a garden overgrown with rank weeds back of an abandoned carpenter shop. The lot is at New York and Thirteenth avenues, Brooklyn.
The boy built a house of old planks, nailed together with a carpenter-like proficiency. Inside he constructed for himself a couch and a fireplace with a chimney outlet; on a peg on the wall hung a stiff whisk-broom with which the earthen floor might be kept smooth.