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corner well where he filled a pail in the mornings. He was thinking he was thirsty.
    “What, Jimmy, really? Don’t you know? Croton. Travels forty miles over bridges, through tunnels, all downhill, just to get to that reservoir uptown.”
    But how would the boy have known that? He lived in the Fourth Ward, where the water had never been connected to the tenement flats.
Sanitation for the population!
was the cry of the social reformers, but it was just a slogan. Neither the city nor the tenement lords would pay to bring the water indoors. Meanwhile, every seven seconds one of New York’s more pampered households flushed a newfangled toilet bowl full of piss-yellow Croton water, sending another tiny wave of sewage out with the ebb, into the harbor—but never far enough. For the flood tide brought it back again, and naturally it settled in the boggy lowlands abutting the slums, and the tenement wells drew a questionable brew that was much the worse for having been in high places.
    The water the firemen were spewing at the blaze was the first Croton water the stableman had ever tasted, but he had no idea how clean and pure it was. There was the clanging of bells, the roar of flames, the rush of pressurized jets, and then he felt the arms of strangers lift him up and carry him away. His sodden clothes swiftly started to freeze into a stiff box around his body, and he felt the ice crack and rain down against his skin as he was packed off, shivering uncontrollably, into an official vehicle, whether ambulance or police wagon he didn’t think to wonder at the time. Someone asked his name, but he couldn’t respond. What did his name matter? What did his face? What did anything, when he’d lost yet again what little he had to lose? Most of Barnum’s animals were certainly dead—if not burned up then suffocated, their lungs scorched beyond resuscitation. His own breath was perilously shallow.
    Through the open rear doors of the coach, the stableman spotted a ghostly figure in a fourth-story window, and he thought a fireman must have ventured into the building to try to save the menagerie. Perhaps they had found the keys to the animals’ shackles. The face he saw was orange and strange, which he put down to the glow of the fire—until it opened its jaws and roared. Raj the tiger was free. The big cat tapped his paws against the hot glass, crouched out of sight, then reappeared in fluid motion. He pounced straight through the windowpane and sailed through the night in an aura of flames, shards and sparks, his leg iron trailing a charred lump of timber.
    His flight was magnificent. The people on the street watched silently as he landed with a thud, then they let out a collective scream. The tiger staggered, one of his legs in grave disorder, at a strange angle from his body. He looked around him, and for an instant his yellow eyes met those of the stableman in the back of the wagon. The fur along Raj’s back smoldered. He grumbled from deep within, dropped to his haunches and roared. Then he ran north, at a fairly fast pace for a tiger who was dragging one leg and a four-by-four by the shackle. The onlookers scattered and the stableman had a view of the tiger’s path. As Raj picked up speed, his singed fur was fanned by the wind and flames broke out across his back and down his long, pumping tail. Then the stableman heard a blast and saw the tiger recoil. Another two shots, and the animal crumpled to the icy pavement with a growl. He had been a splendid but miserable creature whose huge paws had worn a perimeter groove in the wooden floor of his small cage as he furiously paced, mouth half open in contempt, teeth bared, long white belly scruff dangling between his knees. He often sprayed urine at spectators who approached his cage too closely but had never marked the stableman, who sometimes brought him a greenish hunk of beef when the lion tamer was otherwise engaged. Had they shot him to put him out of his agony or because