“If it was only later!” said Eat-’Em-Up Jack, wistfully.
“Later?” retorted Tricker. “That’s easy. You close at one, an’ that’s ten minutes from now. Let the mob make its getaway; an’ after that youse ducks ‘ll find me waitin’ ‘round the corner in Thoid Avenue.”
Tricker, manner nonchalant to the point of insult, loitered to the door, pausing on his way to take a leisurely drink at the bar.
“You dubs,” he called back, as he stepped out into Great Jones Street, “better bring your gatts!”
Gatts is East Sidese for pistols.
Harrington didn’t like the looks of things. He was sorry, he said, addressing Eat-’Em-Up-Jack, but he wouldn’t be able to accompany him to that Third Avenue tryst. He must see Goldie Cora home. The Police had just issued an order, calculated invidiously to inconvenience and annoy every lady found in the streets after midnight unaccompanied by an escort.
Eat-’Em-Up-Jack hardly heard him. Personally he wouldn’t have turned hand or head to have had the company of a dozen Harringtons. Eat-’Em-Up-Jack, while lacking many things, lacked not at all in heart.
The New Brighton closed in due time. Eat-’Em-Up-Jack waited until sure the junction of Great Jones Street and Third Avenue was quite deserted. As he came ‘round the corner, gun in hand, Tricker – watchful as a cat – stepped out of a stairway. There was a blazing, rattling fusillade – twelve shots in all. When the shooting was at an end, Eat-’Em-Up-Jack had vanished. Tricker, save for a reason, would have followed his vanishing example; there was a bullet embedded in the calf of his leg.
Tricker hopped painfully into a stairway, where he might have advantage of the double gloom. He had lighted a cigarette, and was coolly leaning against the entrance, when two policemen came running up.
“What was that shooting?” demanded one.
“Oh, a couple of geeks started to hand it to each other,” was Tricker’s careless reply.
“Did either get hurt?”
“One of ‘em cops it in th’ leg. Th’ other blew.”
“What became of the one who’s copped?”
“Oh, him? He hops into one of th’ stairways along here.”
The officers didn’t see the spreading pool of blood near Tricker’s foot. They hurried off to make a ransack of the stairways, while Tricker hobbled out to a cab he had signaled, and drove away.
Twenty-four hours later!
Not a block from where he’d fought his battle with Tricker, Eat-’Em-Up-Jack was walking in Third Avenue. He was as lone as Lot’s wife; for he nourished misanthropic sentiments and discouraged company. It was a moonless night and very dark, the snow still coming down. What with the storm and the hour, the streets were as empty as a church.
As Eat-’Em-Up-Jack passed the building farthest from the corner lamp, a crouching figure stepped out of the doorway. Had it been two o’clock in the afternoon, instead of two o’clock in the morning, you would have seen that he of the crouching figure was smooth and dark-skinned as to face, and that his blue-black hair had been cut after a tonsorial fashion popular along the Bowery as the Guinea Lop. The crouching one carried in his hand what seemed to be a rolled-up newspaper. In that rolled-up paper lay hidden a two-foot piece of lead pipe.
The crouching blue-black one crept after Eat-’Em-Up-Jack, making no more noise than a cat. He uplifted the lead pipe, grasping it the while with both hands.
Eat-’Em-Up-Jack, as unaware of his peril as of what was passing in the streets of Timbuctoo, slouched heavily forward, deep in thought, Perhaps he was considering a misspent youth, and chances thrown away.
The lead pipe came down.
There was a dull crash, and Eat-’Em-Up-Jack – without word or cry – fell forward on his face. Blood ran from mouth and ears, and melted redly into the snow.
The crouching blue-black one shrank back into the stairway, and was seen no more. The street returned to utter emptiness. There remained only the lifeless body of Eat-’Em-Up-jack. Nothing beyond, save the softly falling veil of snow, with the street lamps shining through.
II. – THE BABY’S FINGERS
It was a Central Office man who told me how the baby lost its fingers. I like Central Office men; they live romances and have adventures. The man I most shrink from is your dull, proper individual to whom nothing happens. You have seen a hundred such. Rigidly correct, they go uneventfully to and fro upon their little respectable tracks. Evenings, from the safe yet severe vantage of their little respectable porches, they pass judgment upon humanity from across the front fence. After which, they go inside and weary their wives with their tasteless, pale society, while those melancholy matrons question themselves, in a spirit of tacit despair, concerning the blessings of matrimony. In the end, first thanking heaven that they are not as other men, they retire to bed, to rise in the dawning and repeat the history of every pulseless yesterday of their existence. Nothing ever overtakes them that doesn’t overtake a clam. They are interesting, can be interesting, to no one save themselves. To talk with one an hour is like being lost in the desert an hour. I prefer people into whose lives intrudes some element of adventure, and who, as they roll out of their blankets in the morning, cannot give you, word and minute, just what they will be saying and doing every hour in the coming twelve.
My Central Office friend, in telling of the baby’s absent fingers, began by speaking of Johnny Spanish. Spanish has been sent to prison for no less than seven years. Dribben and Blum arrested him, and when the next morning he was paraded at the Central Office looking-over, the speech made upon him by Commissioner Flynn set a resentful pulse to beating in his swarthy cheek.
Not that Spanish had been arrested for the baby’s lost fingers. That story in the telling came later, although the wrong it registered had happened months before. Dribben and Blum picked him up – as a piece of work it did them credit – for what occurred in Mersher Miller’s place.
As all the world knows, Mersher Miller, or as he is called among his intimates, Mersher the Strong-Arm, conducts a beer house at 171 Norfolk Street. It was a placid April evening, and Mersher’s brother, as bottle-tosser, was busy behind the bar. Mersher himself was not in, which – for Mersher – may or may not have been greatly to the good.
Spanish came into the place. His hat was low-drawn over his black eyes. Mersher’s brother, wiping glasses, didn’t know him.
“Where’s Mersher?” asked Spanish.
“Not here,” quoth Mersher’s brother.
“You’ll do,” returned Spanish. “Give me ten dollars out of the damper.”
Mersher’s brother held this proposal in finance to be foolishly impossible, and was explicit on that head. He insisted, not without scorn, that he was the last man in the world to give a casual caller ten dollars out of the damper or anything else.
“I’ll be back,” replied Spanish, “an’ I bet then you’ll give me that ten-spot.”
“That’s Johnny Spanish,” declared a bystander, when Spanish, muttering his discontent, had gone his threatening way.
Mersher’s brother doubted it. He had heard of Spanish, but had never seen him. It was his understanding that Spanish was not in town at all, having lammistered some time before.
“He’s wanted be