Alfred Lewis - The Apaches of New York

Harrington came up. Having waltzed the entire length of the Beautiful Blue Danube , he had abandoned Goldie Cora, and was now prepared to personally resent the imputation inherent in Tricker’s remark anent that fair one’s feet.

“He don’t like the way you t’row your feet, eh? I’ll make him like it.”

Thus spake Harrington to Goldie Cora, as he turned from her to seek out Tricker.

No, Gangland is not so ceremonious as to demand that you lead the lady to a seat. Dance ended, it is good form to leave her sticking in the furrow, even as a farmer might his plow, and walk away.

Harrington bitterly added his views to Eat-’Em-Up-Jack’s, and something was said about croaking Tricker then and there. The threats of Harrington, as had those of Eat-’Em-Up-Jack, glanced off the cool surface of Tricker like the moon’s rays off a field of ice. He was sublimely indifferent, and didn’t so much as get off his chair. Only his right hand stole under his coat-skirt in an unmistakable way.

“Why, you big stiff! w’at be youse tryin’ to give me?” was his only separate notice of Harrington. Then, to both: “Unless you guys is lookin’ to give th’ coroner a job, youse won’t start nothin’ here. Take it from me that, w’en I’m bounced out of a dump like this, the bouncin’ ‘ll come off in th’ smoke.”

Eat-’Em-Up-Jack, being neither so quick nor so eloquent as Tricker, could only retort, “That’s all right! I’ll hand you yours before I’m done!”

Harrington, after his first outbreak, said nothing, being privily afraid of Tricker, and more or less held by the spell of his fell repute. Eat-’Em-Up-Jack, who feared no man, was kept in check by his obligations as sheriff – that, and a sense of duty. True, the situation irked him sorely; he felt as though he were in handcuffs. But the present was no common case. Tricker would shoot; and a hail of lead down the length of the dancing floor meant loss in dollars and cents. This last was something which Kelly, always a business man and liking money, would be the first to condemn and the last to condone. It would black-eye the place; since few care to dance where the ballroom may become a battle-field and bullets zip and sing.

“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.

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.