The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright Page A

machine; stopping when it stopped and staring as if hypnotized.
    â€œUsed to take a team of hosses pullin’ a snowplow to do a job like that,” said the old man. “And hundreds of fellas out shovelin’ the way. Nowadays they do it all by machinery. Ain’t no work for nobody. That’s what’s the trouble with this world. I coulda told ’em.”
    The man with the cigar put it back in his mouth and chewed it. Rush wondered how he could.
    â€œI suppose you prob’ly can remember the blizzard of ’eighty-eight?” he said sarcastically, around the cigar.
    â€œSure can,” replied the old man. “I weighed two hundred and eleven pounds them days, and the wind knocked me flat as a haddock at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third. Couldn’t run the hoss cars it was so bad, and they was men diggin’ all over the city. None of these here machines that only employs a couple fellas!”
    The cigar man laughed a short unsympathetic laugh, more like a cough than a laugh, and departed. Rush didn’t like him.
    Out of the dark a woman’s voice shouted: “Ernie and Walter! How many times I hafta tell you to come in?”
    Ernie and Walter turned out to be the two little boys in snowsuits. They left reluctantly, walking backward most of the way and staring at the machine.
    â€œYessir,” said the old man. “You youngsters is brought up soft. Too much machinery. Too many motors, and engines, and eelectrical deevices.”
    â€œWell, they ain’t no motor on this here cart,” said the grocery boy gloomily, and off he went pushing it through the snow and whistling the piercing tuneful way that only grocery boys seem to know how to do.
    â€œLook at that, now,” continued the old man grumpily, staring at the snow-removal machine. “You’d swear it was almost alive. Sometimes I think a day will come when these fellas build so much machinery that it will revolt; turn on ’em and swalla ’em up! It’ll be like the days of the dinosaurs all over again: them snow machines grazin’ on the snow, and Greyhound buses chargin’ over the countryside with no one drivin’; and airplanes swarmin’ like honeybees, and roostin’ in the skyscrapers!”
    â€œI kind of like machinery,” Rush admitted. “Someday I’m going to design and build it. Engines and things. Lots of stuff.”
    The old man looked at him severely, and shook his ear-muffed head.
    â€œThey’ll swalla you up,” he said. “They’ll swalla you up along with the rest of civil-i-zation.”
    Rush’s feet were becoming cold as well as wet, and he thought maybe the old man was a little crazy, so he said good night and started off in the direction of home. The old man was still talking; to himself or to the machine, you couldn’t tell which.
    Rush turned the corner. He began to wish he hadn’t lingered so long; his teeth were chattering in his head; but just as he was about to break into a run he saw something that made him stop.
    Across Lexington Avenue with its heavy traffic a dog was running. Running wildly, like a small flickering shadow, he narrowly escaped extinction beneath the wheels of two large trucks and a taxicab. “Here, pup!” yelled Rush as the dog reached his side of the street, and the taxi driver, who had missed hitting it only by applying the brakes with a tearing squeal, leaned out his window and bawled furiously, “Don’tcha know enough to keep ya dog on a lead!”

    â€œHe isn’t mine,” Rush tried to explain, but the cab was departing, its taillights looking indignant, and the dog was halfway up the block. Rush began to run after it. Nobody else seemed to be paying any attention, and you couldn’t let a lost dog go barging around a city at night and in a snowstorm!
    â€œHere, pup, come back,” called Rush, and then he tried whistling but the dog