“One, two, three, bend! One, two, three, bend!” So barked the physical instructor, a bulgy man with muscles popping out all over him as if his skin had been stuffed with hard-boiled eggs.
Little Peter Mullaney oned, twoed, threed and bent with such earnest and whole-hearted violence that his blue eyes seemed likely to be jostled from their sockets and the freckles to be jarred loose from his thin, wiry arms. Though breathless, and not a little sinew-sore from the stiff setting-up exercises, his small, sharp-jawed face wore a beatified look, the look that bespeaks the rare, ecstatic thrill that comes to mortals so seldom in this life of taxes, prohibitions and denied ambitions. Such a look might a hero-worshiping boy wear if seen by his gang in the company of Jack Dempsey, or a writer if caught in the act of taking tea with Shaw. Peter Mullaney was standing at the very door of his life’s ambition; he was about to be taken “on the cops.”
To be taken “on the cops”–the phrase is departmental argot and is in common use by those who enjoy that distinction–this had been the ideal of Peter Mullaney since the days when he, an undersized infant, had tottered around his Christopher Street back-yard, an improvised broom-stick billy in his hand, solemnly arresting and incarcerating his small companions. To wear that spruce, brass-button studded blue uniform, and that glittering silver shield, to twirl a well-trained night-stick on its cord, to eye the layman with the cold, impassive eye of authority, to whisper mysterious messages into red iron signal boxes on street-corners, to succor the held-up citizen and pursue the crook to his underworld lair, to be addressed as “Officer”–he had lived for this dream.
And here he was, the last man on a row of thirty panting, perspiring probationary patrolmen, ranged, according to height, across the gymnasium of the police training school. From big Dan Mack, six feet four in his socks, they graded down as gently as a ramp to little Peter on the end of the line a scant, a bare five feet five and seven-eighths inches tall including the defiant bristle of his red pompadour.
Peter was happy, and with reason. It was by no generous margin that Peter had gained admission to the school that was to prepare him for his career. By the sheerest luck he had escaped being cast into the exterior darkness; by the slimmest degree he had wiggled into the school, and whether he could attain the goal on which he had kept his eye for twenty years–or ever since he was four–was still decidedly in doubt. The law said in plain, inexorable black and white that the minimum height a policeman can be is five feet and six inches. Peter Mullaney lacked that stature by the distance between a bumble-bee’s eyes; and this, despite the fact that for years he had sought most strenuously, by exercise, diet and even torture to stretch out his body to the required five feet six. When he was eighteen and it seemed certain that an unsympathetic fate had meant him to be a short man, his father found him one day in the attic, lashed to a beam, with a box full of window-weights tied to his feet, and his face gray with pain.
“Shure, me bye,” remarked old man Mullaney as he cut Peter down, “are ye after thinkin’ that the Mullaneys is made of Injy rubber? Don’t it say in the Bible, ‘What man by takin’ thought can add a Cupid to his statue?'”
Peter, in hot and anguished rebellion against this all too evident law of nature had sought relief by going straight out of the house and licking the first boy he met who was twice as big as he was, in a fight that is still remembered in the Second Ward. But stretching and wishing and even eating unpleasant and expensive tablets, alleged by their makers to be made from giraffes’ glands, did not bring Peter up to a full and unquestionable five feet six.
When Peter came up for a preliminary examination which was to determine whether he possessed the material from which policemen are made, Commissioner Kondorman, as coldly scientific as his steel scales and measures, surveyed the stricken Peter, as he stood there on the scales, his freckles in high relief on his skin, for he was pale all over at the thought that he might be rejected.
“Candidate Mullaney,” said the Commissioner, “you’re too short.”
Peter felt marble lumps swelling in his throat.
“If you’d only give me a chance, Commissioner,” he was able to gulp out, “I’d
