It was a perfect day for a funeral. The thin October air had in it a
half-chill, like the cutting edge of the coming winter, still six weeks
away. The leaves, crisp and brown from early frosts, seemed to rustle
approval of the mournful completeness of things.
Florists' shops had been ransacked, greenhouses laid waste, the leading
carriages were moving jungles of blossoms. It was magnificent, and
as the procession wound its slow way into Calvary, the heart of the
undertaker swelled with pride. Not that he was justified; the glory
was the glory of Paper-Box Johnny, who stood back of all this gloomy
splendor with his purse.
“Remember,” was Paper-Box's word to the undertaker, “I'm no piker, an'
neither was Phil; so wade in wit' th' bridle off, an' make th' spiel
same as if you was buryin' yourself.”
Thus exhorted, and knowing the solvency of Paper-Box, the undertaker had
no more than broken even with his responsibilities.
Later, Paper-Box became smitten of concern because he hadn't thought to
hire a brass band. A brass band, he argued, breathing Chopin's Funeral
March, would have given the business a last artistic touch.
“I'd ought to have me nut caved in for forget-tin' it,” he declared;
“but Phil bein' croaked like he was, got me rattled. I'm all in th' air
right now! Me head won't be on straight ag'in for a mont'.”
In the face of Paper-Box's self-condemnation, ones expert in those
sorrowful matters of crape and immortelles, averred that the funeral was
a credit to Casey, and regrets were expressed that the bullet in that
dead hero's brain forbade his sitting up in the hearse and enjoying what
was being done in his honor.
As the first shovelful of earth awoke the hollow responses of the
coffin, there occurred what story writers are fond of describing as a
dramatic incident. As though the hollow coffin-note had been the dead
voice of Casey calling, Dago Frankie knelt at the edge of the grave.
Lifting his hands to heaven, he vowed to shed without mercy the blood of
Goldie Louie and Brother Bill Orr, on sight. The vow was well received
by the uncovered ring of mourners, and no one doubted but Casey's
eternal slumbers would be the sounder for it.
In the beginning, she went by the name of Leoni; the same being
subsequently lengthened, for good and sufficient reasons, to Leoni the
Trouble Maker. As against this, however, her monaker, with the addition,
“Badger,” as written upon her picture--gallery number 7409--to be found
in that interesting art collection maintained by the police, was given
as Mabel Grey.
Leoni--according to Detective Biddinger of that city's Central
Office--was born in Chicago, upon a spot not distant from the banks of
the classic Drainage Canal. She came to New York, and began attracting
police attention about eight years ago. In those days, radiant as a
star, face of innocent beauty, her affections were given to an eminent
pickpocket known and dreaded as Crazy Barry, and it was the dance she
led that bird-headed person's unsettled destinies which won her the _nom
de cour_ of Trouble Maker.
It was unfortunate, perhaps, since it led to many grievous
complications, that Leoni's love lacked every quality of the permanent.
Hot, fierce, it resembled in its intensity a fire in a lumber yard.
Also, like a fire in a lumber yard, it soon burned itself out. Her heart
was as the heart of a wild goose, and wondrous migratory.
Having loved Crazy Barry for a space, Leoni turned cool, then cold, then
fell away from him altogether. At this, Crazy Barry, himself a volcano
of sensibility, with none of Leoni's saving genius to grow cold, waxed
wroth and chafed.
While in this mixed and storm-tossed humor, he came upon Leoni in the
company of a fellow gonoph known as McTafife. In testimony of what
hell-pangs were tearing at his soul, Crazy Barry fell upon McTaffe, and
cut him into red ribbons with a knife. He would have cut his throat, and
spoke of doing so, but was prevailed upon to refrain by Kid Jacobs, who
pointed out the electrocutionary inconveniences sure to follow such a
ceremony.
“They'd slam youse in th' chair, sure!” was the sober-headed way that
Jacobs put it.
Crazy Barry, one hand in McTafife's hair, had drawn the latter's head
across his knee, the better to attend to the throat-cutting. Convinced,
however, by the words of Jacobs, he let the head, throat all unslashed,
fall heavily to the floor. After which, first wiping the blood from
his knife on McTafife's coat--for he had an instinct to be neat--he
lam-mistered for parts unknown, while McTafife was conveyed to the New
York Hospital. This chanced in the Sixth Avenue temple of entertainment
kept by the late Paddy the Pig.
Once out of the hospital and into the street, McTafife and the fair
Leoni found no trouble in being all the world to one another. Crazy
Barry was a thing of the past and, since the Central Office dicks wanted
him, likely to remain so.
McTafife was of the swell mob. He worked with Goldie Louie, Fog-eye
Howard and Brother Bill Orr. Ask any Central Office bull, half learned
in his trade of crook-catcher, and he'll tell you that these names are
of a pick-purse peerage. McTaffe himself was the stinger, and personally
pinched the poke, or flimped the thimble, or sprung the prop, of
whatever boob was being trimmed. The others, every one a star, were
proud to act as his stalls; and that, more than any Central Office
assurance, should show how near the top was McTaffe in gonoph
estimation.
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.”