"That's Caesar," he said, with a sigh of relief. "I've known him for the past year or two, and he'll settle all this trouble."
The boy looked at the police lieutenant with surprise. The police force had had trouble enough, and what could a boy do? He voiced his query.
"His father's a 'Man of Silence,'" was the reply, "and Caesar himself knows all there is to know. You'll see."
Arriving at the center of the crowd, just by the school gate, the boy turned, and speaking to the nearest officer, said, in English, without a trace of foreign accent, shrugging his shoulders:
For a moment he scanned the mob, called the names of two or three men on the outskirts, and Hamilton could see them wince as this fourteen-year-old lad named them; then he commenced a speech, which seemed,--so far as Hamilton could tell--to be ridiculing them for their fears.
The crowd relaxed, and for a moment Hamilton thought the whole trouble was over; but suddenly a man sprang to the front of the rioters, and gesticulating wildly, answered the boy in what seemed to be a threatening tone. The young Italian lad heard him through patiently, then almost without raising his voice, uttered one crisp sentence. The man turned white to the lips and slunk away.
"Ask him," said Hamilton to a policeman, "what he said?"
"I only asked him," the Italian said, "if he wanted me to find out his name--so that you would know it if you wanted to arrest him of course," he added, as an afterthought.
The policeman looked at him and pulled the boy's ear, in fun.
"Av I knew as much about some things as you do," he said, "they'd make me chief. Maybe, though," he added, "I wouldn't hold it long. But what about this, Caesar, is it all over?"
It was as the boy said; Hamilton could see that little by little the crowd was dispersing and that the members of the boyish gang were going all through the groups, evidently explaining that the trouble was all over.
"Ye see what we're up against," the policeman said to Hamilton. "Here's a slip of a lad that c'n just make a crowd do what he says because his father is a leader in the Mafia. There's never any one gives credit enough to the force for keepin peace, between all these foreigners and the Chinks; this ain't an American city, it's a racial nightmare."