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Show Tut' Sons of I I fit K , I FICTION A(1Bam J CORNER i a -lip II ! Wright I BECAUSE he had a problem on his mind that morning Louie didn't give much attention to the man who got in his cab except to notice that he had an old, tired face and looked as though he might have money, and when he heard his passenger pas-senger say, "Grand Central." he pulled out from the curb in a hurry and swung down a side street to Fourth avenue. He hadn't had a decent fare that morning and his time would be up at noon. Grand Central, he knew, wuld meter about seventy-five cents, and If his fare was in the hurry he seemed to be and he got him there on time he might get a quarter extra, making it a dollar. At Twelfth street, seeing some kind of a demonstration ahead of him, Louie tried to I I go down a side .i street to avoid be- 1,118 tng held up. but the Week's street was rilled with trucks and he had Best n choice but to fall In line behind the Fiction stalled uptown traffic. traf-fic. His mouth drew down at the corners and his hands tightened on the steering wheel as he read the signs and banners a group of demonstrators demonstra-tors were carrying. "Darn fools," he said. "Ain't we got troubles enough right here without with-out people worryin' about what goes on in Spain and China and them other foreign countries?" A faint smile played over his passenger's pas-senger's grim, sagging face. He had made a large donation to foreign relief himself, he remembered, about three months ago. He could make good use of that money, now. "You don't believe," he asked, "in charity?" "Not that kind!" Louie exhibited his strong, troubled profile. "Not when there's people in this country needing It just as much as they do about, he thought. And suppose this man had died after he'd given him his blood. Died with his blood in his veins. He'd never thought of that before. And he didn't like it, somehow. some-how. "I guess you're right," he said, his head lowered as he tore the slip from his meter and handed it back, "After all, he didn't know me from Adam. I guess we all make mistakes." mis-takes." A strange smile lighted the man's face. His hand trembled as he drew from his wallet his last hundred dollar bill and pressed it, folded, into Louie's hand. "It's never too late," he said, "to try to rectify those mistakes." . over there." THE MAN gazed admiringly at Louie's thick, lustrous hair, the healthy color of his neck and cheek. "You," he said, "look strong and ' healthy." "I'd be in a pickle," Louie told him, "if I wasn't." "In what way?' Louie shrugged. "You can't support sup-port a family on part time in the cab business." And then, his body seemed to grow rigid between his shoulders, "I'm a blood donor." For a few moments the man was silent; his eyes were reflective. "That's interesting," he said finally. "I'm sure it's appreciated." "You migh think so." Louie gave a short laugh. "The last guy I gave my blood to threw me out of his apartment. He was practically 1 dead. If I'd refused to make the ' transfusion he would have died. ! They wouldn't have had time to get ; anybody else. And yet because I I couldn't pay him a month and a half's back rent I owed him he had me thrown out in the street furniture, furni-ture, wife and kids everything." "That seems. . . unfair." "Unfair!" Louie's hand tightened over the steering wheel. "How would you feel if the guy that cracked down on you was walking ! around the streets with your blood : In him? And this guy's rich! He didn't need the money. He'd given : five thousand bucks to the Red Cross a couple of months before. He's got more real estate in New York than he knows what to do with." Louie put his cab in gear. The parade had moved on. Traffic was beginning to thin out ahead. "I'm just praying that some day I'll meet that guy. There's some things I'd like to tell him." "You'd recognize him this man, if you saw him?" "Only by his picture in the newspapers. news-papers. They had him all covered up when I gave him the transfusion. Only his arm was sticking out." Louie crossed Fourteenth street and i swung Into the outside lane to make up for the lost time. "But I'll meet him some day," he said. For some time the man behind him gazed directly through the windshield. He seemed to be unaware un-aware of the fact that his face was in full view of the rear-vision mirror. mir-ror. He looked very old, and very tired. "I see what you mean," he said finally, and Louie could just barely hear him above the noise of traffic. "I suppose we do pay too much attention at-tention to what's going on in other countries and overlook sometimes what's going on right under our noses. But we mean all right. It's easier for us to give to an organization organiza-tion 'that's rigged up to help groups of people than it is to look around yourself for people who need help. (i IF YOU were to meet the man you gave your blood to and didn't know him you might think him a pretty decent kind of a fellow. A man isn't generally thoughtless or bad just because he's rich. Suppose he was caught in a jam himself and needed every dollar he could lay his hands on. Suppose a group of banks were going to foreclose on him and he'd lose everything he had in the world if they did? A fellow like you young and healthy, why, you could afford to lose a million dollars. You could make it back again if you wanted to; and if you didn't want to you could do something some-thing else. "But when a man gets along in life and then loses everything he's been working for for forty or fifty years it's apt to be quite as big a shock to him as it was to you to be turned out of your apartment. In fact, some very good men aren't able to survive such shocks. "For all you know, that man may be dead. You may never see or even hear of him again." With a strange feeling in his throat, Louie turned his cab into Forty-second street and drew up before be-fore Grand Central station. The guy seemed to know what he was talking |