Part 8

Every profession has its drawbacks, and that of picking pockets possesses several. For one irritating element, it is apt to take the practitioner out of town for weeks on end. Some sucker puts up a roar, perhaps, and excites the assiduities of the police; or there is a prize fight at Reno, or a World's Fair at St. Louis, or a political convention at Chicago, or a crowd-gathering tour by some notable like Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Taft, which gives such promise of profit that it is not to be refused. Thus it befell that McTaffe, with his mob, was greatly abroad in the land, leaving Leoni deserted and alone.

Once McTaffe remained away so long that it caused Leoni uneasiness, if not alarm.

“Mack's fell for something,” was the way she set forth her fears to Big Kitty: “You can gamble he's in hock somewheres, or I'd have got the office from him by wire or letter long ago.”

When McTaffe at last came back, his face exhibited pain and defeat. He related how the mob had been caught in a jam in Chihuahua, and Goldie Louie lagged.

“The rest of the fleet managed to make a getaway,” said McTaffe, “all but poor Goldie. Those Greasers have got him right, too; he's cinched to do a couple of spaces sure. When I reached El Paso, I slimmed me roll for five hundred bucks, an' hired him a mouthpiece. But what good is a mouthpiece when there ain't the shadow of a chance to spring him?”

“So Goldie got a rumble, did he?” said Leoni, with a half sigh.

Her tones were pensive to the verge of tears; since her love for Goldie was almost if not quite equal to the love she bore McTaffe.

Goldie Louie lay caged in the Chihuahua calaboose, and Sanky Dunn joined out with McTaffe and the others in his place. With forces thus reorganized, McTaffe took up the burdens of life again, and--here one day and gone the next--existence for himself and Leoni returned to old-time lines.

Leoni met Casey. With smooth, dark, handsome face, Casey was the superior in looks of either McTaffe or Goldie Louie. Also, he had fame as a gun-fighter, and for a rock-like steadiness under fire. He was credited, too, by popular voice, with having been busy in the stirring, near vicinity of events, when divers gentlemen got bumped off. This had in it a fascination for Leoni, who--as have the ladies of every age and clime--dearly loved a warrior. Moreover, Casey had money, and, unlike those others, he was always on the job. This last was important to Leoni, who at any moment might find herself at issue with the powers, and Casey, because of his political position, could speak to the judge.

Leoni loved Casey, even as she had aforetime loved McTaffe, Goldie Louie and Crazy Barry. True, Casey owned a wife. But there arose nothing in his conduct to indicate it; and since he was too much of a gentleman to let it get in any one's way, Leoni herself was so generous as to treat it as a technicality.

McTaffe and his mob returned from a losing expedition through the West. Leoni asked as to results.

“Why,” explained McTaffe, sulkily, “th' trip was not only a waterhaul, but it leaves me on the nut for twelve hundred bones.”

McTaffe turned his pockets inside out, by way of corroboration.

While thus irritated because of that financial setback, McTaffe heard of Leoni's blushing nearness to Casey. It was the moment of all moments when he was least able to bear the blow with philosophy.

And McTaffe stormed. Going farther, and by way of corrective climax, he knocked Leoni down with a club. After which--according to eye-witnesses, who spoke without prejudice--he proceeded to beat her up for fair.

Leoni told her adventures to Casey, and showed him what a harvest of bruises her love for him had garnered. Casey, who hadn't been born and brought up in Mulberry Bend to become a leading light of Gangland for nothing, took his gun and issued forth on the trail of McTaffe. McTaffe left town. Also, that he didn't take his mob with him proved that not graft, but fear of Casey, was the bug beneath the chip of his disappearance.

“He's sherried,” Casey told Leoni, when that ill-used beauty asked if he had avenged her bruises. “But he'll blow in ag'in; an' when he does I'll cook him.”

Goldie Louie came up from Chihuahua, his yellow hair shot with gray, the prison pallor in the starved hollows of his cheeks. Mexicans are the most merciless of jailers. Fog-eye Howard, who was nothing if not a gossip, wised him up as to Leoni's love for Casey. In that connection Fog-eye related how McTaffe, having rebuked Leoni's heart wanderings with that convincing club, had now become a fugitive from Casey's gun.

Having heard Fog-eye to the end, Goldie faithfully hunted up Leoni and wore out a second club on her himself. Again did Leoni creep to Casey with her woes and her wrongs, and again did that Knight of Mulberry Bend gird up his fierce loins to avenge her.

Let us step rearward a pace.

After the Committee of Fourteen, in its uneasy purities, had caused Chick Tricker's Park Row license to be revoked, Tricker, seeking a livelihood, became the owner of the Stag in Twenty-eighth Street, just off Broadway. That license revocation had been a financial jolt, and now in new quarters, with Berlin Auggy, whom he had brought with him as partner, he was striving, in every way not likely to invoke police interference to re-establish his prostrate destiny.

It was the evening next after the one upon which Goldie Louie, following the example of the vanished McTaffe, had expressed club-wise his disapproval of Leoni's love for Casey. The Stag was a riot of life and light and laughter; music and conversation and drink prevailed. In the rear room--fenced off from the bar by swinging doors--was Goldie Louie, together with Fog-eye Howard, Brother Bill Orr and Sanky Dunn. There, too, Whitey Dutch was entertaining certain of the choicest among the Five Pointers. Scattered here and there were Little Red, the Baltimore Rat, Louis Buck, Stager Bennett, Jack Cohalan, the Humble Dutchman, and others of renown in the grimy chivalry of crime. There were fair ones, too, and the silken sex found dulcet representation in such unchallenged belles as Pretty Agnes, Jew Yetta, Dutch Ida, and Anna Gold. True, an artist in womanly beauty might have found defects in each of these. And if so? Venus had a mole on her cheek, Helen a scar on her chin.

Tricker was not with his guests at the Stag that night. His father had been reported sick, and Tricker was in filial attendance at the Fourteenth Street bedside of his stricken sire. In his absence, Auggy took charge, and under his genial management beer flowed, coin came in, and all Stag things went moving merrily.

Whitey Dutch, speaking to Stagger Bennett concerning Pioggi, aforetime put away in the Elmira Reformatory for the Coney Island killing of Cyclone Louie and Kid Twist, made quite a tale of how Pioggi, having served his time, had again shown up in town. Whitey mentioned, as a matter for general congratulation, that Pioggi's Elmira experience had not robbed him of his right to vote, as would have been the blighting case had he gone to Sing Sing.

“There's nothing in that disfranchisement thing, anyhow,” grumbled the Humble Dutchman, who sat sourly listening. “I've been up th' river twict, an' I've voted a dozen times every election since. Them law-makin' stiffs is goin' to take your vote away! Say, that gives me a pain!”

The Humble Dutchman got off the last in tones of supreme contempt.

Grouped around a table near the center, and under convoy of a Central Office representative who performed towards them in the triple rôle of guide, philosopher and friend, were gathered a half dozen Fifth Avenue males and females, all members in good standing of the Purple and Fine Linen Gang. Auggy, in the absence of Tricker, had received them graciously, pressed cigars and drinks upon them, declining the while their proffered money of the realm in a manner composite of suavity and princely ease.

“It's an honor, loides an' gents,” said Auggy, “merely to see your maps in the Stag at all. As for th' booze an' smokes, they're on th' house. Your dough don't go here, see!”

The Purple and Fine Linen contingent called their visit slumming. If they could have heard what Auggy, despite his beaming smiles and royal liberality touching those refreshments, called both them and their visit, after they had left, it might have set their patrician ears afire.

Having done the Stag, and seen and heard and misunderstood things to their slumming souls' content, the Purple and Fine Linen Gang said goodbye. They must drop in--they explained--at the Haymarket, just around the corner in Sixth Avenue. Auggy invited them to come again, but was visibly relieved once they had gone their slumming way.

“I was afraid every minute some duck'd start something,” said Auggy, “an' of course if anything did break loose--any little t'ing, if it ain't no more than soakin' some dub in th' jaw--one of them Fift' Avenoo dames's 'ud be bound to t'row a fit.”

“Say!” broke in Anna Gold resentfully; “it's somethin' fierce th' way them high s'ciety fairies comes buttin' in on us. W'at do they think they're tryin' to give us, anyway? For th' price of a beer, I'd have snatched one of them baby-dolls baldheaded. I'd have nailed her be th' mop; an' w'en I'd got t'rough doin' stunts wit' her, she wouldn't have had to tell no one she'd been slummin'.”

“Now, forget it!” interposed Auggy warningly. “You go reachin' for any skirt's puffs round here, an' it'll be the hurry-up wagon at a gallop an' you for the cooler, Anna. The Stag's a quiet joint, an' that rough-house stuff don't go. Chick won't stand for no one to get hoited.”

“Oh, Chick won't stand for no one to get hoited!” retorted the acrid Anna, in mighty dudgeon. “An' the Stag's a quiet joint! Why, it ain't six weeks since a guy pulls a cannister in this very room, an' shoots Joe Rocks full of holes. You helps take him to the hospital yourself.”

“Cut out that Joe Rocks stuff,” commanded Aug-gy, with vast heat, “or you'll hit the street on your frizzes--don't make no mistake!”

Observing the stormy slant the talk was taking, Whitey Dutch diplomatically ordered beer, and thus put an end to debate. It was a move full of wisdom. Auggy was made nervous by the absence of Tricker, and Anna the Voluble, on many a field, had shown herself a lady of spirit.

While the evening at the Stag thus went happily wearing towards the smaller hours, over in Twenty-ninth Street, a block away, the stuss game of Casey and Paper-Box Johnny was in full and profitable blast. Paper-Box himself was in active charge. Casey had for the moment abandoned business and every thought of it. Leoni had just informed him of those visitations at the hands of Goldie Louie, and set him to thinking on other things than cards.

“An' he says,” concluded Leoni, preparing to go, “after he's beat me half to death, 'now chase 'round an' tell your Dago friend, Casey, that my monaker ain't McTaffe, an' that if he starts to hand me anythin', I'll put him down in Bellevue for the count.'”

The dark face of Casey displayed both anger and resolution. He made neither threat nor comment, but his eyes were full of somber fires. Leoni departed with an avowed purpose of subjecting her injuries to the curative effects of arnica, while Casey continued to gloom and glower, drinking deeply the while to take the edge off his feelings.

Harry Lemmy, a once promising prize-fighter of the welter-weight variety, showed up. Also, he had no more than settled to the drink, which Casey--whom the wrongs of his idolized Leoni could not render unmindful of the claims of hospitality--had ordered, when Jack Kenny and Charlie Young appeared.

The latter, not alive to the fatal importance of such news, spoke of the Stag, which he had left but the moment before, and of the presence there of Goldie Louie.

“McTaffe's stalls, Fog-eye, Brother Bill an' Sanky Dunn, are lushin' wit' him,” said Young. “You know Sanky filled in wit' th' mob th' time Goldie gets settled in Mexico.”

Goldie Louie, only a block away, set the torch to Casey's heart.

“Where's Dago Frankie?” he asked.

Dago Frankie was his nearest and most trusted friend.

“He's over in Sixt' Avenoo shootin' craps,” replied Lemmy. “Shall I go dig him up?”

“It don't matter,” said Casey, after a moment's thought. Then, getting up from his chair, he inquired, “Have you guys got your cannons?”

“Sure t'ing!” came the general chorus, with a closer from Kenny.

“I've got two,” he said. “A sport might get along wit'out a change of shoits in Noo York, but he never ought to be wit'out a change of guns.”

“W'at's on, Phil?” asked Charlie Young, anxiously, as Casey pulled a magazine pistol, and carefully made sure that its stomach was full of cartridges; “w'at's on?”

“I'm goin' over to the Stag,” replied Casey. “If you ducks'll listen you'll hear a dog howl in about a minute.”

“We'll not only listen, but we'll go 'long,” returned Young.

Lemmy and Kenny fell behind the ethers. “W'at's th' muss?” whispered Lemmy.

“It's Leoni,” explained Kenny guardedly. “Goldie give her a wallop or two last night, an' Phil's goin' to do him for it.”

Casey strode into the Stag, his bosom a storm-center for every black emotion. The sophisticated Auggy smelled instant trouble on him, as one smells fire in a house. Bending over the friendly shoulder of Whitey Dutch, Auggy spoke in a low tone of warning.

“There's Phil Casey,” he said, “an' t'ree of his bunch. It's apples to ashes he's gunnin' for Goldie. If Chick were here, now, he'd somehow put the smother on him.”

“Give him a call-down your own self,” was Whitey's counsel. “W'at with Chick's license bein' revoked in Park Row, an' Joe Rocks goin' to the hospital from here only a little over a mont' ago, the least bit of cannonadin' 's bound to put th' joint in Dutch all the way from headquarters to the State excise dubs in Albany.”

“I know it,” returned Auggy, in great trouble of mind. “If a gun so much as cracks once, it'll be th' fare-you-well of the Stag.”

“Well, w'at do youse say?” demanded the loyal Whitey. “I'm wit' youse, an' I'm wit' Chick, an' I'm wit' Goldie. Give th' woid, an' I'll pull in a harness bull from off his beat.”

“No, none of that! Chick'd sooner burn the joint than call a cop.”

“I'll go give Casey a chin,” said Whitey, “meb-by I can hold him down. You put Goldie wise. Tell him to keep his lamps on Casey, an' if Casey reaches for his gatt to beat him to it.”

Casey the decisive moved swiftly, however, and the proposed peace intervention failed for being too slow. Casey got a glimpse of Goldie through the separating screen doors. It was all he wanted. The next moment he had charged through.

Chairs crashed, tables were overthrown, women shrieked and men cursed. Twenty guns were out. Casey fired six times at Goldie Louie, and six times missed that lucky meddler with other people's pocket-books. Not that Casey's efforts were altogether thrown away. His first bullet lodged in the stomach of Fog-eye, while his third broke the arm of Brother Bill.

Whitey Dutch reached Casey as the latter began his artillery practice, and sought by word and moderate force to induce a truce. Losing patience, however, Whitey, as Casey fired his final shot, pulled his own gun and put a bullet through and through that berserk's head. As Casey fell forward, a second bullet--coming from anywhere--buried itself in his back.

“By the Lord, I've croaked Phil!” was the exclamation of Whitey, addressed to no one in particular.

They were Whitey's last words; some one shoved the muzzle of a gun against his temple, and he fell by the side of Casey.

No sure list of dead and wounded for that evening's battle of the Stag will ever be compiled. The guests scattered like a flock of blackbirds. Some fled limping and groaning, others nursing an injured arm, while three or four, too badly hurt to travel, were dragged into nooks of safety by friends who'd come through untouched. There was blood to the east, blood to the west, on the Twenty-eighth Street pavements, and a wounded gentleman was picked up in Broadway, two blocks away. The wounded one, full of a fine prudence and adhering strictly to gang teachings, declared that the bullet which had struck him was a bullet of mystery. Also, he gave his word of honor that, personally, he had never once heard of the Stag.

When the police reached the field of battle--wearing the ill-used airs of folk who had been unwarrantably disturbed--they found Casey and Whitey Dutch dead on the floor, and Fog-eye groaning in a corner. To these--counting the injured Brother Bill and the prudent one picked up in Broadway, finally identified as Sanky Dunn--rumor added two dead and eleven wounded.

Leoni?

The Central Office dicks who met that lamp of loveliness the other evening in Broadway reported her as in abundant spirits, and more beautiful than ever. She had received a letter from McTaffe, she said, who sent his love, and her eyes shone like twin stars because of the joy she felt.

“Mack always had a good heart,” said Leoni.

Paper-Box Johnny--all in tears--bore sorrowful word of her loss to Mrs. Casey, calling that matron from her slumbers to receive it. Paper-Box managed delicately.

“It's time to dig up black!” sobbed Paper-Box; “they've copped Phil.

“Copped Phil?” repeated Mrs. Casey, sleepily. “Where is he?”

“On a slab in the morgue. Youse'd better chase yourself over.”

“All right,” returned Mrs. Casey, making ready to go back to bed, “I will after awhile.”

VIII. THE WAGES OF THE SNITCH

Knowledge is power, and power is a good thing, as you yourself well know. Since Eve opened the way, and she and Adam paid the price--a high one, I sometimes think--you are entitled to every kind of knowledge. Also, you are entitled to all that you can get.

But having acquired knowledge, you are not entitled to peddle it out in secret to Central Office bulls, at a cost of liberty and often life to other men. When you do that you are a snitch, and have thrown away your right to live. Anyone is free to kill you out of hand, having regard only to his own safety. For such is the common law of Gangland.

Let me ladle out a cautionary spoonful.

As you go about accumulating knowledge, you should fix your eye upon one or two great truths. You must never forget that when you are close enough to see a man you are close enough to be seen. It is likewise foolish, weakly foolish, to assume that you are the only gas jet in the chandelier, the only pebble on the beach, or possess the only kodak throughout the entire length of the boardwalk. Bear ever in mind that while you are getting the picture of some other fellow, he in all human chance is snapping yours.

This last is not so much by virtue of any law of Gangland as by a law of nature. Its purpose is to preserve that equilibrium, wanting which, the universe itself would slip into chaos and the music of the spheres become but the rawest tuning of the elemental instruments. The stars would no longer sing together, but shriek together, and space itself would be driven to stop its ears. Folk who fail to carry these grave matters upon the constant shoulder of their regard, get into trouble.

At Gouverneur hospital, where he died, the register gave his name as “Samuel Wendell,” and let it go at that. The Central Office, which finds its profit in amplification, said, “Samuel Wendell, _alias_ Kid Unger, _alias_ the Ghost,” and further identified him as “brother to Johnny the Mock.”

Samuel Wendell, _alias_ Kid Unger, _alias_ the Ghost, brother to Johnny the Mock, was not the original Ghost. Until less than two years ago the title was honorably worn by Mashier, who got twenty spaces for a night trick he turned in Brooklyn. Since Mashier could not use the name in Sing Sing, Wendell, _alias_ Kid Unger, brother to Johnny the Mock, adopted it for his own. It fitted well with his midnight methods and noiseless, gliding, skulking ways. Moreover, since it was upon his own sly rap to the bulls, who made the collar, that Mashier got pinched, he may have felt himself entitled to the name as part of his reward. The Indian scalps his victim, and upon a similar principle Wendell, _alias_ Unger, brother to Johnny the Mock, when Mashier was handed that breath-taking twenty years, may have decided to call himself the Ghost.

It will never be precisely known how and why and by whose hand the Ghost was killed, although it is common opinion that Pretty Agnes had much to do with it. Also, common opinion is more often right than many might believe. In view of that possible connection with the bumping off of the Ghost, Pretty Agnes is worth a word. She could not have been called old. When upon a certain Saturday evening, not remote, she stepped into Jack Sirocco's in Chatham Square, her years counted fewer than nineteen. Still, she had seen a good deal--or a bad deal--whichever you prefer.

Pretty Agnes' father, a longshoreman, had found his bread along the docks. None better ever-shaped for a boss stevedore, or trotted up a gangplank with a 280-pound sack of sugar on his back. One day he fell between the side of a moored ship and the stringpiece of the wharf; and the ship, being at that moment ground against the wharf by the swell from a passing steamer, he was crushed. Those who looked on called him a fool for having been killed in so poor a way. He was too dead to resent the criticism, and after that his widow, the mother of Pretty Agnes, took in washing.

Her mother washed, and Pretty Agnes carried home the clothes. This went on for three years. One wind-blown afternoon, as the mother was hanging out clothes on the roof--a high one--and refreshing her energies with intermittent gin from the bottle of her neighbor, the generous Mrs. Callahan, she stepped backward down an airshaft. She struck the flags ten stories below, and left Pretty Agnes to look out for herself.

Looking out for herself, Pretty Agnes worked in a sweatshop in Division Street. Here she made three dollars a week and needed five. The sweatshop owner--for she was a dream of loveliness, with a fog of blue-black hair and deep brown eyes--offered to make up the lacking two, and was accepted.

Round, ripe, willowy, Pretty Agnes graduated from the Division Street sweatshop to a store in Twenty-third Street. There she served as a cloak model, making fourteen dollars a week while needing twenty. The manager of the cloak store was as generous as had been the owner of the sweatshop, and benevolently made up the absent six.

For Pretty Agnes was lovelier than ever.

All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy. Also, it has the same effect on Jill. Pretty Agnes--she had a trunkful of good clothes and yearned to show them--went three nights a week to one of those dancing academies wherewith the East Side was and is rife. As she danced she met Indian Louie, and lost no time in loving him.

Having advantage of her love, that seeker after doubtful dollars showed Pretty Agnes where and how she could make more money than would come to her as a cloak model in any Twenty-third Street store. Besides, he jealously disapproved of the benevolent manager, though, all things considered, it is hard to say why.

Pretty Agnes, who had grown weary of the manager and to whom Louie's word was law, threw over both the manager and her cloak-model position. After which she walked the streets for Louie--as likewise did Mollie Squint--and, since he often beat her, continued to love him from the bottom of her heart.