With O'Hagan dead and Blizzard turned penitent, the bottom of course
fell clean out of the scheme to loot Maiden Lane and the Sub-Treasury.
But the work of Lichtenstein and his agents had not been in vain. Like
the man in the opera Lichtenstein had a little "list." The
lieutenant-governor soon retired into private life. He gave out that he
wished to devote the remainder of his life to philanthropic enterprises.
The police commissioner resigned, owing to ill health. Others who had
counted too many unhatched chicks went into bankruptcy. Some thousands
of discontents in the West who had been promised lucrative work in New
York, about January 15th, were advised to stick to their jobs, and to
keep their mouths shut. The two blind cripples who had delved for so
many years in Blizzard's cellars were brought up into the light and
cared for. Miss Marion O'Brien went home to England with an unusually
large pot of savings, and married a man who spent these and beat her
until she had thoroughly paid the penalty for all her little
dishonesties and treacheries. It was curious that all the little people
in the plot received tangible punishments, while the big people seemed
to go scot-free. Blizzard, for instance.
No sooner recovered from the operation on the back of his head than the
creature was up and doing. In straightening out his life and affairs he
displayed the energy of a steam-boiler under high pressure and a
colossal cheerfulness.
His first act was to marry Rose; his second to let it be known
throughout the East Side that he was no longer marching in the forefront
of crime. This ultimatum started a procession of wrongdoers to Marrow
Lane. They came singly, in threes and fours, humble and afraid; men of
substance, gun-men, the athletic, the diseased, fat crooks, thin crooks,
saloon-keepers and policemen, Italians and Slavs, short noses and long
(many--many of them), two clergymen, two bankers, sharp-eyed children,
married women who were childless, unmarried women who weren't--and all
these came trembling and with but the one thought: "Is he going to tell
what he knows about us?"
He was not. Some he bullied a little, for habit is strong; some he
treated with laughter and irony, some with wit, and some with kindness
and deep understanding. He might have been an able shepherd going to
work on a hopelessly numerous black and ramshackle flock of sheep. He
couldn't expect to make model citizens out of all his old heelers; he
couldn't expect to turn more than fifty per cent of his two clergymen
into the paths of righteousness. But with the young criminals he took
much pains, giving money where it would do good, and advice whether it
would do good or not. Among the first to come to him was Kid Shannon.
"Now look a-here," said the Kid, "I bin good and bad by turns till I
don't know which side is top side. But this minute I'm good--d'you get
me? If you want to jail me you kin do it, nobody easier; but don't do
it! You was always a bigger man than me, and when you led I
followed--for a real man had rather follow a strong bad man than a good
slob any day. You out of the lead, I got nothing to follow but me own
wishes, and they're all to the good these days."
"A woman?" said Blizzard sternly.
"She ain't a woman yet," said the Kid, "and she ain't a kid--she's about
half-past girl o'clock, and she thinks there's no better man in the
United States than always truly yours, Kid Shannon. I got a good saloon
business, and nothing crooked on hand but what's past and done with, and
I looks to you to give a fellow a chance. Do I get it? Jail ain't goin'
to help me, and it would break her. Look here, sport: I _want_ to
be good."
"Kid," said Blizzard, "no man that _wants_ to be good need be afraid of
me. You'd have been a good boy always--if it hadn't been for me. _I_
know that as well as you. I've got the past all written down in my head.
I can't rub it out. But any man that's got the nerve can put new writing
across and across the old, until the old can't be read, or if it could
would read like a joke. You can tell whomsoever it concerns to do well
and fear nothing. At first I thought to tell Lichtenstein every first
and last thing that I knew about this city, and he tried to make me
tell. We had a meeting, Old Abe and I did. I was always afraid of the
little Jew, Kid. Well, face to face, I wasn't. He talked, and I talked.
And I was the stronger. He lets me go scot-free, and I don't tell
anything. If others get you for what you've done, it can't be helped.
But none of you'll be got through me. The past is buried; but if in the
future any of you fellows start anything, and I hear of it--look out"