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job, agreed with Martin in principle about the display of cigars but had strong opinions of his own, and seemed untroubled by the idea of working for someone three years younger than himself—although Martin at seventeen, with his serious dark eyes and soft brown mustache, looked like a man of twenty-one.
    Bill Baer fell in happily with a secret plan of Martin’s, and one Sunday a few weeks before the cigar stand was to change hands, the two men took the Second Avenue El down to the old neighborhood, getting off at Canal and walking east toward the river. The old neighborhood was changing. Poles and Bohemians stood in doorways and leaned out of windows, ragged children sat on the curbs, and everywhere you looked you saw the black-eyed Ostjuden, dark and curly-bearded, gabbling their harsh tongue, crowding the streets, filling the tenements—forcing the Germans north, Bill Baer told Martin, into the quiet German streets around Tompkins Square, which the old people still called Der Weisse Garten. On a cobbled lane lined with furniture shops and clothing stores they came to a narrow alley. Baer led Martin along the alley to a small courtyard of workshops, where over an open doorway hung a wooden griffin with faded red wings and a blue tongue. Inside the dusky shop there was a sharp smell of fresh wood and varnish. Pallid sunlight swirling with sawdust penetrated partway into the gloom. They walked along a twisting path that led among shadowy life-sized figures,leaning wooden signs, upside-down barrels heaped with pawnbrokers’ balls, a wooden lion with open jaws—and always the stern Indians, standing erect, eyes glaring out their defiance. Martin heard scraping sounds. They came to an open door that led into a small workroom. A short, thick-chested old man in a leather apron stood planing a rough figure beside a workbench. Another man stood in a corner, applying paint to the face of an Indian. On the bench lay an ax, a spokeshave, scattered chisels, a mallet, piles of sandpaper of different roughnesses. The woodcarver, Asmus Friedländer, spoke only German. Bill Baer questioned him and led Martin back into the shop.
    “He says we can pick any one we like, except the fellows over there by the windows, with the tickets around their necks. They’re sold. Or he can knock one out for us. Any style.”
    “If we can’t find the right one. But I have a feeling—” Together they walked among the wooden Indians, who in the half dark stared at them with a kind of melancholy fierceness. Some stood stiffly with their arms close to their sides, some leaned forward on one foot and shaded their eyes like old Tecumseh, some held an arm straight out, but however they posed, they clutched in one fist a bundle of wooden cigars. Bill explained that all the Indians were made of white pine; the logs came from the waterfront spar yards. Martin imagined a barge loaded with white pine logs floating down the East River to a loading dock, where theywere piled onto a delivery wagon and drawn clattering over cobbles by a team of big-hoofed truck horses to the workshop of Asmus Friedländer. There were stern chiefs and brave young scouts and bosomy squaws, and here and there a different sort of figure who also held out a bundle of cigars: a Blackamoor with a brilliant red turban, a Highlander in a kilt, a fashionable lady wearing boots. Martin was surprised to see a Chinaman in a pigtail holding a large box in both hands; Bill explained that it was destined for a tea store. After a while Martin stopped before a figure and stood looking at it with his chin in his hand and his head tilted slightly. The Indian was a chief, a little smaller than life-sized. Both elbows were pressed close to the sides and both forearms extended: one hand held a tomahawk, the other a bundle of cigars.
    “What do you think of this noble warrior?” he asked Bill.
    “Oh, he’ll bring ’em in. He’ll do just fine. With a little more color in his