No one knew his real name, not even the police, and the police, let me tell you, know much more than they can prove. The Central Office never once had the pleasure of mugging and measuring and parading him at the morning bawling out, and the Mulberry Street records to the last were barren concerning him. For one brief space and only one did Mulberry Street nourish hopes. That was when he himself let it be thought that somewhere, sometime, somehow, he had taken some one's life. At this, Mulberry Street fairly shook the wide earth like a tablecloth in search of proof, but got not so much as one poor crumb of confirmation.

It was at Big Jack's in Chatham Square that local history first laid eyes on him. Big Jack is gone now; the Committee of Fourteen decided upon him virtuously as an immoralist, handed him the fatal blue paper, and he perished. Jack Sirocco—who was himself blue-papered in a Park Row hour—keeps the place now.

Starting from Big Jack's, he soon began to be known in Flynn's, and Nigger Mike's, and about the Chatham Club. When his pals spoke to him they called him Louie. When they spoke of him they called him Indian Louie, or Spanish Louie, to the end that he be identified among the hosts of East Side Louies, who were and are as many as the leaves on a large tree.

Rumor made Indian Louie a native of South America, and his dark skin, black eyes, thin lips, high cheek-bones and high curved nose helped rumor out in this. Also, he was supposed to be of Spanish or Portuguese extraction.

When Louie was buried, this latter assumption received a jolt. His funeral, conducted by a rabbi, was according to strictest Hebrew ceremonial.

Two pieces of porcelain were laid upon his eyes, as intimating that he had seen enough. A feather, which a breath would have disturbed, was placed upon his upper lip. This was to evidence him as fully and conclusively dead, although on that point, in all conscience, the coroner's finding should have been enough. The flowers, which Gangland sent to prove its grief, were put aside because too gay and pleasant. The body was laid upon straw. A would-be pallbearer, since his name was Cohen, had to be excluded from the rites, as any orthodox Jew could have told him must be the case. For death and the dead are unclean; and a Cohen, who by virtue of his name is of the high-priest caste—Aaron was a Cohen—and tends the altars, must touch nothing, approach nothing, that is unclean. The funeral was scrupulously held before the second sun went down, and had to be hurried a little, because the morgue authorities, hobbled of red tape, move as slowly as the sea itself in giving up the dead. The coffin—of poorest pine—was knocked to pieces in the grave, before the clods of earth were shoveled in and the doomsday sods laid on. The garments of him who acted as principal mourner were faithfully torn; that is to say, the rabbi cut a careful slit in the lapel of that mourner's waistcoat where it wouldn't show.

You will see from this, that every detail was holy by most ancient Jewish prescription. And the business led to talk. Those about Flynn's, Nigger Mike's and the Chatham Club, to say naught of members of the Humpty Jackson gang, and others who in his latter days had been near if not dear to him, confessed that it went far in contradiction of any Spanish or Portuguese ancestry for Louie.

Louie was a mystery, and studied to be so. And to be a mystery is as difficult as being a hypocrite. One wrong word, one moment off your guard, and lo, a flood of light! The mystery vanishes, the hypocrisy is laid bare. You are no longer a riddle. Or, if so, then a riddle that has been solved. And he who was a riddle, but has been solved, is everywhere scoffed at and despised.

Louie must have possessed a genius for mystery, since not once did he fall down in that difficult rÔle. He denied nothing, confirmed nothing, of the many tales told about him. A waif-word wagged that he had been in the army, without pointing to any regiment; and that he had been in the navy, without indicating what boat. Louie, it is to be thought, somewhat fostered this confusion. It deepened him as a mystery, and made him more impressive.

Louie was careful, also, that his costume should assist. He made up all in black—black shoes, black trousers, black coat, black hat of semi-sombrero type. Even in what may be spoken of as the matter of linen—although there was no linen about it—he adhered to that funereal hue, and in lieu of a shirt wore a sweater, collar close up to the chin, and all as black as his coat. As he walked the streets, black eyes challenging, threatening, from underneath the black, wide-rimmed hat, he showed not from top to toe a fleck of white.

Among what tales went here and there concerning Louie, there was one which described him as the deadest of dead shots. This he accentuated by a brace of big Colt's pistols, which bore him constant company, daylight and dark. There was no evidence of his having used this artillery, no word of any killing to his perilous glory. Indeed, he couldn't have pointed to so much as one wounded man.

Only once did those pistols come into play. Valenski's stuss house, in Third Avenue near Fourteenth Street, was put in the air. The hold-ups descended upon Valenski's, grabbed $80 which was on the table, and sent Valenski into his safe for $300 more. While this went on, Louie stood in the door, a gun in each fist, defying the gaping, staring, pop-eyed public to interfere. He ran no risk, as everyone well knew. The East Side, while valorous, never volunteers. There was no more chance of outside interference to save Valenski from being plundered, than of outside contributions to make him up another roll.

The incident might have helped in building up for Louie a reputation, had it not been that all that was starkly heroic therein melted when, two days later, the ravished $380 was privily restored to Valenski, with the assurance that the entire business was a jest. Valenski knew nothing humorous had been intended, and that his bundle was returned in deference only to the orders of one high in politics and power. Also, it was the common feeling, a feeling no less cogent for not being put into words, that had Louie been of the wood from which champions are carved, the $380 would never have come back. To refrain from some intended stick-up upon grave orders given, might mean no more than prudence and a right discipline. But to send back money, once in actual hand and when the risk and work of which it stood the harvest had been encountered and performed, was to fly in the face of gang ethics. An order to that effect, however eminent its source, should have been met with stony refusal.

There was one tale which should go, perhaps, to the right side of the reputational ledger, as indicating that Louie had nerve. Crazy Charlie was found dead in the mouth of a passageway, which opened off Mulberry Street near the Bowery. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. No one of sense supposed Louie did that throat slashing.

Crazy Charlie was a hop-head, without a dollar in his jeans, and Louie never did anything except for money. He would no more have gone about a profitless killing, than he would have wasted time and effort by fishing in a bathtub.

For all that, on the whispered hint of the Ghost—who himself was killed finally as a snitch—two plain-clothes men from the Eldridge Street station grabbed Louie. They did not tell him the reason of the pinch. Neither did they spread it on the books. The police have a habit of protecting themselves from the consequences of a foolish collar by a specious system of concealment, and put nothing on the blotter until sure.

When searched at the desk, Louie's guns were discovered. Also, from inside his waistcoat was taken a seven-inch knife, which, as said the police sergeant, might have slit the windpipe of Crazy Charlie or any other bug. But, as anyone with eyes might see, the knife was as purely virginal as when it came from a final emery wheel in its far-off Sheffield home. It had slit nothing.

Still, those plain-clothes dicks did not despair. They hoped to startle Louie into a confession. With a view to his moral and physical stampede, they conveyed Louie in a closed patrol wagon, at mirk midnight, to the morgue. He hadn't been told what he was charged with; he didn't know where he was going.

The wagon backed up to the morgue door. Louie had never visited the morgue before, though fated in the end to appear there officially. The plainclothes men, one at each shoulder, steered him inside. All was thick blackness; you couldn't have seen your own nose. Feeling their wordless way, the painstaking plain-clothes folk manhandled Louie into position.

Then they flashed on a flood of electric light.

There, within two feet of Louie, and squarely beneath his eyes, lay the dead Crazy Charlie, posed so as to show effectively that gruesome slash across the throat. Louie neither started nor exclaimed. Gazing down on the dead Charlie, he searched forth a cigarette and turned to one of his plain-clothes escorts for a match.

“Do you see this?” demanded the plain-clothes man, slewing round the dead head until that throat-gash yawned like some horrid mouth.

The plain-clothes man was wroth to think he should have worked so hard to achieve so little.

“Yes,” retorted Louie, as cold as a wedge. “Also, I'll tell you bulls another thing. You think to rattle me. Say, for ten cents I'd sit on this stiff all night an' smoke a pipe.”

Those plain-clothes artists gave Louie up. They turned him loose at the morgue door.

The affair worked round, and helped Louie to a better position in the minds of all fair men. It fell in lucky, too, since it more than stood off a setback which overtook him about the same time. Louie had called upon the Irish Wop, at the latter's poolroom in Fourth Avenue. This emigrant from Mayo was thin and slight and sickly, and Louie argued that he might bully him out of a handful of money. Putting on a darkest frown, he demanded fifty dollars, and intimated that dire indeed would be the consequences of refusal.

“Because,” said Louie, “when I go out for anything I get it, see?”

The Wop coughed timidly and made a suggestion. “Come round in half an hour,” said he, “when the last race from New Orleans is in; I'll have the cush ready for yez.”

Louie withdrew, and the Wop shoved the poker into the blazing big-bellied stove.

An hour later, that New Orleans race having been run, Louie returned. The poker being by this time white-hot, the Wop drew it forth from the stove. There were no stage waits. Applying the poker to the shrinking rear of Louie, the Wop compelled that yearner after fifty dollars to leap screechingly from a second-storey window.

“That's phwy I puts th' windy up,” explained the Wop; “I didn't want that chape skate to bre-a-ak th' glassh. Indian Louie! Spanish Louie!” he repeated with measureless contempt. “Let me tell youse ginks wan thing.” This to a circle who had beheld the flight of Louie. “If ever that bum shows up here ag'in, I'll put him out av business altogether. Does he think a two-cint Guinea from Sout' Ameriky can bluff a full-blown Mick?”

Louie's flight through the Wop's window, as had his steadiness at the morgue, went the gossipy rounds. It didn't injure him as much as you might think.

“For who,” said the general voice, “would face and fight a white-hot poker?”

On the whole, public sentiment was inclined to sustain Louie in that second-storey jump.

From what has been written, it will not astonish you to hear that, upon the important matter of courage, Louie's place in society had not been absolutely fixed. Some said one thing, some another. There are game men in Gangland; and there exist others who aren't the real thing. Sardinia Frame believes, with the Irish Wop, that Louie belonged in the latter class. Also, Sardinia Frank is entitled to an opinion. For he was born in Mulberry Bend, and has himself been tried twice on charges of murder.

It was Sardinia Frank, by the way, who smote upon Eat-'em-up Jack with that effective lead pipe, albeit, there being no proof, he was never arrested for it. No, he doesn't admit it, even among intimates and where such admission would be respected as sacred. But when joked concerning it, he has ever worn a cheerful, satisfied look—like the pictures of the cat that ate the canary—and while careful not to accept, was equally careful not to reject, the compliment implied. Moreover, when the dead Eat-'em-up-Jack was picked up, the lead pipe used to break his skull had been tucked jocosely under his arm. It was clear to knowing ones that none except Sardinia Frank would have thought of such a jest. To him it would have come readily enough, since death always appealed to his sense of humor.

Clad in a Tuxedo and an open-face suit, Sardinia Frank, at the time I questioned him, was officiating as peace-preserver in the Normandie rathskeller. By way of opener, I spoke of his mission on the rathskeller earth.

“I'm here to keep out everybody I know,” said he simply.

There was a pathetic side to this which, in his ingenuousness, Frank failed wholly to remark.

“About Indian Louie?” I at last said.

It was within an hour after Louie had been killed.

“I'll tell youse about Louie,” returned Frank. “Of course, he's dead, an' lyin' on a slab in th' morgue right now. They 'phoned me woid ten minutes ago. But that don't make no difference. He was a bluff; he wasn't th' goods. He went around wit' his hat over his eyes, bulldozin' everybody he could, an' lettin' on to be a hero. An' he's got what heroes get.”

“Did you ever get tangled up with him?” I asked.

“Let me show you,” and Frank became confidential. “This'll give youse a line. One time he's got two hundred bones. Mollie Squint climbs into a yap-wagon an' touches a rube for it. Louie takes it, an' plants it wit' Nigger Mike. That's about six months ago. Th' next night, me bein' wise to it, I chases to Mike an' says, 'Louie's over to Jigger's, pointin' stuss, an' he wants th' two hundred.' So Mike hands me th' dough. I splits it five ways wit' th' gang who's along, each of us gettin' his little old bit of forty dollars apiece.

“Louie, when he finds out next day, makes an awful beef. He tells everybody he's goin' to hand it to me—goin' to cook me on sight, see? I hears of it, an' I hunts Louie up in Jack Sirocco's.

“'Say, Louie,' I says, 'about that cookin' me. Th' bully way would be to come right now over to Hoboken, an' bump me off to-night. I'll go wit' youse. An' there won't be no hang-over, see; 'cause no one in Joisey'll care, an' no one in New York'll know.'

“Do youse think Louie'll come? Not on your necktie! He didn't want me game—just wanted to talk, that's all.

“'Not youse, Frank,' he said; 'I ain't gunnin' for youse. It's Nigger Mike; he's th' guy I'm goin' to croak. He oughtn't to have let youse have th' money.' No, of course, he don't go after Mike; that's simply his crawl.

“Take it from me,” Frank concluded, “Louie wasn't th' goods. He'd run a bluff, but he never really hoited a guy in his whole life. As I says, he goes about frownin', an' glarin', an' givin' people th' fiery eye, an' t'rowin' a chest, an' lettin' it go broadcast that he's a hero. An' for a finish he's got w'at heroes get.”

Such was the word of Sardinia Frank.

When he fell with two bullets through his brain, and two more through his body, Louie had $170 in his pocket, $700 in his shoe, and $3,000 in the Bowery Bank. This prosperity needn't amaze. There was, for one thing, a racket reason to be hereinafter set forth. Besides, Pretty Agnes and Mollie Squint both walked the streets in Louie's loved behalf, and brought him all in the way of riches that came to their lure. Either was sure for five dollars a day, and Mollie Squint, who could graft a little, once came in with $800. Both Pretty Agnes and Mollie Squint most fiercely adored Louie, and well did he know how to play one loving heart against the other. Some say that of the pair he preferred Pretty Agnes. If so, he wasn't fool enough to let her find it out. She might have neglected her business to bask in his sweet society.

Besides, when it came to that, Louie's heart was really given to a blonde burlesquer, opulent of charm. This artiste snubbed and neglected Louie for the love of a stage manager. But she took and spent Louie's money, almost if not quite as fast as Pretty Agnes and Mollie Squint could bring it to him from the streets.

Louie never made any place his hangout long. There was no element of loyalty in him, whether for man or for woman, and he went from friend to friend and gang to gang. He would stay nowhere, remain with no one, after his supremacy had been challenged. And such hardy natures as Biff Ellison, Jimmy Kelly, Big Mike Abrams, Chick Tricker and Jack Sirocco were bound to challenge it. They had a way, too, of putting the acid on an individual, and unless his fighting heart were purest gold they'd surely find it out. And Louie never stood the test. Thus, beginning at Big Jack's in Chatham Square, Louie went from hangout to hangout, mob to mob, until, working through Nigger Mike's, the Chatham Club and Sharkey's, he came at last to pal in with the Humpty Jackson guerrillas.

These worthies had a stamping ground in a graveyard between First and Second Avenue, in the block bounded north and south by Twelfth and Thirteenth Streets. There Louie was wont to meet such select company as Monahokky, Nigger Ruhl, Candy Phil, the Lobster Kid, Maxie Hahn, and the Grabber. As they lolled idly among the tombstones, he would give them his adventures by flood and by field. Louie, besides being conceited, was gifted with an imagination and liked to hear himself talk. Not that he felt obliged to accuracy in these narrations. It was enough that he made them thrilling, and in their telling shed an effulgent ray upon himself.

While he could entertain with his stories, Louie was never popular. There was that doubt about his courage. Also, he was too frugal. No one had ever caught the color of his money. Save in the avaricious instance of the big blonde burlesquer, as hungry as false, he held by the selfish theology that it is more blessed to receive than to give.

Taking one reason and another, those about Louie at the finish were mainly the Humpty Jackson bunch. His best hangout of any fashion was the Hesper Club. Had Humpty Jackson remained with his own, Louie might have been driven, in search of comradeship, to go still further afield. Humpty was no weakling, and while on the surface a whining, wheedling, complaining cripple, owned his volcanic side, and had once shot it out, gun to gun and face to face, with no less a paladin than Jimmy Kelly. Louie would have found the same fault with Humpty that he had found with those others. Only Humpty didn't last long enough after Louie joined his forces. Some robbery came off, and a dull jury held Humpty responsible. With that, the judge sent him up for a long term of years, and there he sticks to-day. Humpty took the journey crying that he had been jobbed by the police. However that may have been, his going made it possible for Louie to remain with the Jacksons, and shine at those ghoulish, graveyard meetings, much longer than might otherwise have been the case.

While Louie had removed to the remote regions about Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue, and was seldom seen in Chatham Square or Chinatown, he was not forgotten in those latter precincts. Jew Yetta brought up his name one evening in the Chatham Club, and spoke scornfully of him in conjunction with the opulent blonde.

“That doll's makin' a farmer of Louie,” was the view of Jew Yetta.

“At that,” remarked the Dropper—for this was in the days of his liberty and before he had been put away—“farmer or no farmer, it's comin' easier for him now than when he was in the navy, eatin' sow-belly out of a harness cask an' drinkin' bilge. W'at's that ship he says he's sailin' in, Nailer?” continued the Dropper. “Ain't it a tub called Atalanta?”

“There never is a ship in the navy named Atalanta.”

This declaration, delivered with emphasis, emanated from old Jimmy, who had a place by himself in East Side consideration. Old Jimmy was about sixty, with a hardwood-finish face and 'possum-colored hair. He had been a river pirate in the old days, and roamed the midnight waters for what he might pick up. Those were times when he troubled the police, who made him trouble in return. But one day old Jimmy salvaged a rich man's daughter, who—as though to make his fortune—had fallen overboard from a yacht, and bored her small hole in the water within a rod or two of Jimmy's skiff. Certainly, he fished her out, and did it with a boat hook. More; he sagaciously laid her willowy form across a thwart, to the end that the river water flow more easily from her rosebud mouth. Relieved of the water, the rescued beauty thanked Jimmy profusely; and, for his generous part, her millionaire father proceeded to pension his child's preserver for life. The pension was twenty-five dollars a week. Coming fresh and fresh with every Monday, Jimmy gave up his piracies and no longer haunted in the name of loot the nightly reaches of the river. Indeed, he became offensively idle and honest.

“No sir,” repeated old Jimmy; “there never is a ship in our navy named Atalanta.”

“All th' same,” retorted the dropper, “I lamps a yacht once w'at's called Atalanta.”

“An' who says No?” demanded old Jimmy, testily. “I'm talkin' about th' United States Navy. But speakin' of Louie, it ain't no cinch he's ever in th 'navy. I'd sooner bet he's been in jail.”

“An' if he was,” said Jew Yetta, “there ain't no one here who's got anything on him.”

“W'at does Atalanta mean, anyway?” questioned the Dropper, who didn't like the talk of jails. “Is it a place?”

“Nixie,” put in Slimmy, the erudite, ever ready to display his learning. “Atalanta's the name of a skirt, who b'longs 'way back. She's some soon as a sprinter, too, an' can run her one hundred yards in better than ten seconds. Every god on Olympus clocked this dame, an' knew what she could do.”

“W'at's her story?” asked the Dropper.

“It gets along, d'ye see, where Atalanta's folks thinks she ought to get married. But she won't have it; she'd sooner be a sprinter. With that, they crowd her hand; an' to get shut of 'em, she finally tacks it up on the bulletin board that she'll chase to th' altar only with some student who can beat her at a quarter mile dash. 'No lobsters need apply!' says she. Also, there's conditions. Under the rules, if some chump calls th' bluff, an' can't make good—if she lands him loses—her papa's headsman will be on th' job with his axe, an' that beaten gink'll get his block whacked off.”

“An' does any one go against such a game?” queried Jew Yetta.

“Sure! A whole fleet of young Archibalds and Reginalds went up ag'inst it. They all lose; an' his jiblets wit' th' cleaver chops off their youthful beans.

“But the luck turns. One day a sure-thing geek shows up whose monaker is Hippomenes. Hippy's a fly Indian; there ain't goin' to be no headsman in his. Hippy's hep to skirts, too, an' knows where th' board is off their fence. He organizes with three gold apples, see, an' every time little Atalanta Shootin' Star goes flashin' by, he chucks down one of 'em in front of her. She simply eats it up; she can't get by not one; an' she loses so much time grabbin' for 'em, Hippy noses in a winner.”

“Good boy!” broke forth the Dropper. “An' do they hook up?”

“They're married; but it don't last. You see its Venus who shows Hippy how to crab Atalanta's act an' stakes him to th' gold apples. An' later, when he double-crosses Venus, that goddess changes him an' his baby mine into a-couple of lions.”

The Irish Wop had been listening impatiently. It was when Governor Hughes flourished in Albany, and the race tracks were being threatened. The Wop, as a pool-room keeper, was vastly concerned.

“I see,” said the Wop, appealing directly to old Jimmy as the East Side Nestor, “that la-a-ad Hughes is makin' it hot for Belmont an' Keene an' th' rist av th' racin' gang. Phwat's he so ha-a-ard on racin' for? Do yez look on playin' th' ponies as a vice, Jimmy?”

“Well,” responded old Jimmy with a conservative air, “I don't know as I'd call it a vice so much as a bonehead play.”

“They call it th' shpo-r-rt av kings,” observed die Wop, loftily.

Old Jimmy snorted. “Sport of kings!” said he. “Sport of come-ons, rather. Them Sport-of-kings gezebos 'll go on, too, an' give you a lot of guff about racin' bein' healthy. But they ain't sayin' a word concernin' th' mothers an' youngones livin' in hot two-room tenements, an' jumpin' sideways for grub, while th' husbands and fathers is blowin' in their bank-rolls in th' bettin' ring, an' gettin' healthy. An' th' little jocks, too—mere kids! I've wondered th' Gerries didn't get after 'em. But I suppose th' Gerries know who to pass up, an' who to pinch, as well as th' oldest skipper on th' Force.”

“F'r all that,” contended the Wop, stubbornly, “thim la-a-ads that's mixed up wit' th' racin' game is good feltys.”

“Good fellows,” repeated old Jimmy with contempt. “I recollect seein' a picture once, a picture of a girl—a young wife, she is—lyin' with her head on an untouched dinner table—fallen asleep, poor thing! Th' clock in the picture is pointin' to midnight. There she's been waitin' with th' dinner she's cooked with her own little lovin' mitts, for that souse of a husband to come home. Under th' picture it says, 'For he's a jolly good fellow!'”

“Somebody'd ought to have put a head on him!” quoth Jew Yetta, whose sympathies were both active and militant.

“Say,” went on Jimmy, “that picture gets on my nerves. A week later I'm down be th' old Delmonico joint at Twenty-sixth an' Broadway. It's meb-by one o'clock in th' mornin'. As I'm goin' by th' Twenty-sixt' Street door, out floats a fleet of Willies, stewed to the gills, singin' in honor of a dude who's in th' middle, 'For he's a jolly good fellow.'

“'Who's that galoot?' I asks th' dub who's slammin' carriage doors at the curb. 'Is he a married man?'

“'He's married all right,” says th' door-slammin' dub.

“Wit that I tears into him. It's a good while ago, an' I could slug a little. Be th' time th' copper gets there, I've got that jolly good fellow lookin' like he'd been caught whistlin' Croppies Lie Down at Fiftieth Street an' Fift' Avenoo when th' Cathedral lets out.”

“Well, I'm not married,” remarked the Wop, snappishly;—“I'm not married; I niver was married; an' I niver will be married aloive.”

“Did youse notice?” remarked the Dropper, “how they gets a roar out of old Boss Croker? He's for racin' all right.”

“Naturally,” said old Jimmy. “Him ownin' race horses, Croker's for th' race tracks. He don't cut no ice.”

“How much do yez figger Croker had cleaned up, Jimmy, when he made his getaway for Ireland?” asked the Wop, licking an envious lip.

“Without comin' down to book-keepin',” returned old Jimmy, carelessly, “my understandin' is that, be havin' th' whole wad changed into thousand dollar bills, he's able to get it down to th' dock on a dray.”

The Grabber came in. He beckoned Slimmy, and the two were at once immersed in serious whisperings.

“What are youse two stews chinnin' about?” called out the Dropper lazily, from across the room. “Be youse thinkin' of orderin' th' beer?”

“It's about Indian Louie,” replied Slimmy, angrily. “Th' Grabber here says Louie's out to skin us.”

“Indian Louie,” remarked the Wop, with a gleam in his little gray eye. “That's th' labberick w'at's goin' to shti-i-ick up me poolroom f'r thim fifty bones. Anny wan that'd have annything to do wit' a bum loike him ought to get skinned.”

“W'at's he tryin' to saw off on youse?” asked the Dropper.

“This is th' proposition.” It was the Grabber now. “Me an' Slimmy here goes in wit' Louie to give that racket last week in Tammany Hall. Now Louie's got th' whole bundle, an' he won't split it. Me an' Slimmy's been t'run down for six hundred good iron dollars apiece.”

“An' be yez goin' to let him get away wit' it?” demanded the Wop.

“W'at can we do?” asked the Grabber, disconsolately.

“It's that big blonde,” declared Jew Yetta' with acrimony. “She's goin' through Louie for every dollar. I wonder Mollie Squint an' Pretty Agnes don't put her on th' fritz.”

The Hesper Club was in Second Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets. It was one o'clock in the morning when Indian Louie took his accustomed seat at the big table in the corner.

“How's everybody?” he asked, easily. “I oversleeps meself, or I'd been here hours ago.”

“W'at tires you?” asked Candy Phil. Not that he cared, but merely by way of conversation.

“It's th' big feed last night at Terrace Garden. I'm two days trainin' for it, an' all day gettin' over it. Them swell blowouts is something fierce!” and Louie assumed a wan and weary air, intended to be superior.

“So you was at Terrace Garden?” said Nigger Ruhl.

“Was I? Youse should have seen me! Patent leathers, white choker, and a diamond in th' middle of me three-sheet big enough to trip a dog.”

“There's nothin' in them dress suits,” protested Maxie Hahn. “I'm ag'inst 'em; they ain't dimmycratic.”

“All th' same, youse've got to wear 'em at these swell feeds,” said Candy Phil. “They'd give youse th' gate if you don't. An' as for not bein' dimmycratic”—Candy Phil had his jocose side—“they make it so you can't tell th' high-guys from th' waiters, an' if that ain't dimmycratic what is? Th' only thing I know ag'inst 'em is that youse can't go to th' floor wit' a guy in 'em. You've got to cut out th' scrappin', an' live up to the suit, see?” The Grabber strolled in, careless and smiling. Louie fastened him with eyes of dark suspicion, while Maxie Hahn, the' Lobster Kid and Candy Phil began pushing their chairs out of the line of possible fire. For they knew of those monetary differences.

“Not a chance, sports,” remarked the Grabber, reassuringly. “No one's goin' to start anything. Let's take a drink,” and the Grabber beat upon the table as a sign of thirst. “I ain't after no one here.”

“Be youse alludin' to me, Grabber?” asked Louie, with a frown like a great cloud. “I don't like them cracks about startin' somethin'.”

“Keep your shoit on,” expostulated the Grabber, clinking down the change for the round of beers; “keep your shoit on, Louie. I ain't alludin' at nobody nor nothin', least of all at youse. Besides, I just gets a message for you—only you don't seem in no humor to receive it.”

“Who's it from?” asked Louie.

“It's Laura”—Laura was the opulent blonde—“Mollie Squint an' Pretty Agnes runs up on her about an hour ago at Twelfth Street an' Second Avenoo, an' Mollie bounces a brick off her coco. A copper comes along an' chases Mollie an' Pretty Agnes. I gets there as they're carry in' Laura into that Dago's joint be th' corner. Laura asks me if I sees youse to tell w'at's happened her; that's all.”

“Was Mollie and Agnes sloughed in?” asked Louie, whose practical mind went first to his breadwinners.

“No, they faded into th' next street. Th' cop don't want to pinch 'em anyway.”

“About Laura; was she hoited much?”

“Ten stiches, an' a week in Roosevelt Hospital; that's the best she can get.”

“I must chase round an' look her over,” was Louie's anxious conclusion. “W'at's that Dago joint she's at?”

“It's be th' corner,” said the Grabber, “an' up stairs. I forgets the wop's monaker.” As Louie hesitated over these vague directions, the Grabber set down his glass. “Say, to show there's no hard feelin', I'll go wit' youse.”

As Louie and the Grabber disappeared through the door, Candy Phil threw up both hands as one astonished to the verge of nervous shock.

“Well, w'at do youse think of that?” he exclaimed. “I always figgered Louie had bats in his belfry; now I knows it. They'll croak him sure!” Nigger Ruhl and the Lobster Kid arose as though to follow. At this, Candy Phil broke out fiercely.

“W'at's wrong wit' youse stews? Stick where you be!”

“But they'll cook Louie!” expostulated the Lobster Kid.

“It ain't no skin off your nose if they do. W'y should youse go buttin' in?”

Louie and the Grabber were in Twelfth Street, hurrying towards Second Avenue. Not a soul, except themselves, was abroad. The Grabber walked on Louie's right, which showed that either the latter was not the gunplayer he pretended, or the word from Laura had thrown him off his guard.

Suddenly, as the pair passed a dark hallway, the Grabber's left arm stole round Louie's neck.

“About that dough, Louie!” hissed the Grabber, at the same time tightening his left arm.

Louie half turned to free himself from the artful Grabber. As he did so, the Grabber's ready right hand brought his pistol into action, and one bullet and then another flashed through Louie's brain. A slim form rushed out of the dark hallway, and fired two bullets into Louie's body. Louie was dead before he struck the pavement.

The Grabber, with his slim companion, darted through the dark hallway, out a rear door and over a back fence. Sixty seconds later they were quietly walking in Thirteenth Street, examples of law-abiding peace.

“It was th' easiest ever, Slimmy!” whispered the Grabber, when he had recovered his breath. “I knew that stall about Laura'd fetch him.”

“Who was at th' Hesper Club?”

“On'y Candy Phil, th' Lobster Kid an' two or three other blokes. Every one of 'em's a right guy. They won't rap.”

“Thim la-a-ads,” remarked the Wop, judiciously, when he heard of Louie's taking off—“thim la-a-ads musht 'av lost their heads. There's six or seven hundred bones on that bum, an' they niver copped a splinter!”

The word came two ways to the Central Office. One report said “Indian Louie” and another “Johnny Spanish.” Detective O'Farrell invaded Chinatown, and dug up Big Mike Abrams, that the doubt might be removed.

“It's Indian Louie, all right,” said Big Mike, following a moment's silent survey of the rigid form. Then, in a most unlooked for vein of sentiment: “They all get here at last!”

“That's no dream!” agreed the morgue attendant. “An', say, Mike”—he liked his joke as well as any other—“I've been expectin' you for some time.”

“Sure!” returned Big Mike, with a friendly grin; “I'll come chasin' along, feet foist, some mornin'. But don't forget that while I'm waitin' I'm workin'. I've sent two stiffs down here to youse already, to help keep you goin' till I comes. Accordin' to th' chances, however, me own turn oughtn't to be so very far away.”

Big Mike Abram's turn was just three weeks away.

“Who were those two, Mike, you sent down here to the morgue?” asked O'Farrell, carelessly.

O'Farrell had a catlike fame for slyness.

“Say,” grinned Big Mike, derisively; “look me over! I ain't wearin' no medals, am I, for givin' meself up to you bulls?”