Another would-be sooicide, eh! Here, Kid,” to a sharp gamin who does errands and odd commissions for the house; “take this mut in where dey kills ’em.”

The speaker is a loud young man, clad in garments of violence. The derby tilted over eye, the black cigar jutting ceilingward at an agle of sixty degrees, the figured shirt whereof a dominating dye is angry red, the high collar and flash tie, with its cheap stone, all declare the Bowery. As if to prove the proposition announced of his costume, the young man is perched on a stool, the official ticket-seller of a Bowery theatre.

Mike Menares, whom the Bowery person alludes to as the “mut,” is a square-shouldered boy of eighteen; handsome he is as Apollo, yet with a slow, good-humored guilelessness of face. He has come on business bent. That mighty pugilist, the Dublin Terror, is nightly on the stage, offering two hundred dollars to any amateur among boxers who shall remain before him four Queensberry rounds. Mike Menares, he of the candidly innocent countenance, desires to proffer himself as a sacrifice.

“Youse is just in time, sport,” remarks the brisk gamin to whom Mike has been committed, as he pilots the guileless one to the stage door. “It’s nine o’clock now, an’ d’ Terror goes on to do his bag-t’umpin’ turn at ten. After that comes d’ knockin’ out, see! But say! if youse was tired of livin’, why didn’t you jump in d’ East river? I’d try d’ river an’d’ morgue before I’d come here to be murdered be d’ Terror.”

Mike makes no retort to this, lacking lightness of temper. His gamin conductor throws open the stage door and signals Mike to enter.

“Tell d’ butcher here’s another calf for him,” vouchsafes the gamin to the stage-hands inside the door.

Let us go back four hours to a three-room tenement in Pitt Street. There are two rooms and a little kennel of a kitchen. The furnishings are rough and cheap and clean. The lady of the tenement, as the floors declare, is a miracle of soap and water. And the lady is little Mollie Lacy, aged eleven years.

The family of the Pitt Street tenement is made up of three. There is Mike Menares, our hero; little Mollie; and, lastly, her brother Davy, aged nine. Little Davy is lame. He fell on the tenement stairs four years before and injured his hip. The hospital doctors took up the work where the tenement stairs left off, and Davy came from his sick-bed doomed to a crutch for life.

Mike Menares is half-brother of the younger ones. Nineteen years before, Mike’s mother, Irish, with straw-colored hair and blue eyes, wedded one Menares, a Spanish Jew. This fortunate Menares was a well-looking, tall man; with hair black and stiffening in a natural pompadour. He kept a tobacco stall underneath a stair in Park Row, and was accounted rich by the awfully poor about him. He died, however, within the year following Mike’s birth; and thus there was an end to the rather thoroughbred dark Spanish Jew.

Mike’s mother essayed matrimony a second time. She selected as a partner in this experiment a shiftless, idle, easy creature named David Lacy, who would have been a plasterer had not his indolence defeated his craft. Little Mollie, and Davy of the clattering crutch, occurred as a kind of penalty of the nuptials.

Three years and a half before we encounter this mixed household, Lacy, the worthless, sailed away on a China ship without notice or farewell. Some say he was “shanghaied,” and some that he went of free will. Mrs. Lacy adopted the former of the two theories.

“David Lacy, too idle to work ashore, assuredly would not go to sea where work and fare are tenfold harder.”

Thus argued Mrs. Lacy. Still, a solution of Lacy’s reasons for becoming a mariner late in life is not here important. He sailed and he never returned; and as Mrs. Lacy perished of pneumonia the following winter, they both may be permitted to quit this chronicle to be meddled with by us no further.

Mike Menares had witnessed fifteen years when his mother died. As suggested, he is a singularly handsome boy, and of an appearance likely to impress. From his Conemara mother, he received a yellow head of hair. Underneath are a pair of jet black brows, a hawkish nose, double rows of strong white teeth, and deep soft black eyes, as honest as a hound’s, the plain bestowal of his Jewish father.

Mike was driving a delivery wagon for the great grocers, Mark & Milford, when his mother died. This brought six dollars a week. After the sad going of his mother, Mike found a second situation where he might work evenings, and thereby add six further dollars to that stipend from Mark & Milford. This until the other day continued. On twelve dollars a week, and with little Mollie—a notable housekeeper—to manage for the Pitt Street tenement, the composite house of Menares and Lacy fared well.

Mike’s evening labors require a description. One Sarsfield O’Punch, an expert of boxing and an athlete of some eminence, maintains a private gymnasium on Fifty-ninth street. This personage is known to his patrons as “Professor O’Punch.” Mike, well-builded and lithe, broad of shoulder, deep of lung, lean of flank, a sort of half-grown Hercules, finds congenial employ as aid to Professor O’Punch. Mike’s primal duty is to box with those amateurs of the game who seek fistic enlightenment of his patron, and who have been carried by that scientist into regions of half-wisdom concerning the bruising art for which they moil. From eight o’clock until eleven, Mike’s destiny sets him, one after the other, before a full score of these would-be boxers, some small and some big, some good and some bad, some weak and some strong, but all zealous to a perspiring degree. These novices smite and spare not, and move with all their skill and strength to pummel Mike. They have, be it said, but indifferent success; for Mike, waxing expert among experts, side-steps and blocks and stops and ducks and gets away; and his performances in these defensive directions are the whisper of the school.

Now and then he softly puts a glove on some eager face, or over some unguarded heart, or feather-like left-hooks some careless jaw, to the end that the other understand a peril and fend against it. But Mike, working lightly as a kitten, hurts no one; such being the private commands of Professor O’Punch who knows that to pound a pupil is to lose a pupil.

It is to be doubted if the easy-natured Mike is aware of his wonderful strength of arm and body, or the cat-like quickness and certainty of his blows. During these three years wherein he has been underling to Professor O’Punch, Mike strikes but two hard blows. One evening several of the followers of Professor O’Punch are determining their prowess on a machine intended to register the force of a blow. Following each other in a fashion of punching procession, these aspiring gymnasts, putting their utmost into the swings, strike with all steam. Four hundred to five hundred pounds says the register; this is vaunted as a vastly good account.

Mike, with folded arms and stripped to ring costume—his official robes—is looking on, a smile lighting his pleasant face. Mike is ever interested and ever silent.

As the others smite, Mike beams with approval, but makes no comment. At last one observes:

“Menares, how many pounds can you strike?”

“I don’t know,” replies Mike, in a surprised way, “I never tried.”

“Try now,” says the other; “I’ve a notion you could hit hard enough if you cared to.”

The others second the speaker. Much and instant curiosity grows up as to what Mike can do with his hands if he puts his soul into it. There is not an amateur about but knows more of Mike than does the latter of himself. They know him as one perfect of defensive boxing; also, they recall the precise feather-like taps which Mike confers on the best of their muster whenever he chooses; but none has a least of knowledge of how bitterly hard Mike’s glove might be sent home should ever his heart be given to the trial.

Being urged, Mike begins to rouse; he himself grows curious. It has never come to him as a thought to make the experiment. The “punching machine” has stood there as part of the paraphernalia of the gymnasium. But to the fog-witted Mike, who comes to work for so many dollars a week and who has not once considered himself in the light of a boxer, whether excellent or the reverse, it held no particular attraction. It could tell him no secrets he cares a stiver to hear.

Now, Mike for a first time feels moved to a bit of self-enlightenment. Poising himself for the effort, Mike, with the quickness of light, sends in a right-hand smash that all but topples the contrivance from its base. For the moment the muscles of his back and leg knot and leap in ropelike ridges; and then they as instantly sink away. The machine registers eight hundred and ninety-one pounds.

The on-gazers draw a long breath. Then they turn their eyes on Mike, whose regular outlines, with muscles retreated again into curves and slopes and shimmering ripples, have no taint of the bruiser, and whose handsome features, innocent of a faintest ferocity, recall some beautiful statue rather than anything more viciously hard.

Mike’s second earnest blow comes off in this sort. He is homeward bound from gymnasium work one frosty midnight. Not a block from his home, three evil folk of the night are standing beneath an electric light. Mike, unsuspicious, passes them. Instantly, one delivers a cut at Mike’s head with a sandbag. Mike, warned by the shadow of uplifted arm, springs forward out of reach, wheels, and then as the footpad blunders towards him, Mike’s left hand, clenched and hammerlike, goes straight to his face. Bone and teeth are broken with the shock of it; blood spurts, and the footpad comes senseless to the pave. His ally, one of the other two, grasps at Mike’s throat. His clutch slips on the stern muscles of the athlete’s neck as if the neck were a column of brass. Mike seizes his assailant’s arm with his right hand; there is a twist and a shriek; the second robber rolls about with a dislocated fore-arm. The third, unharmed, flies screeching with the fear of death upon him.

At full speed comes a policeman, warned of his duty by the howls of anguish. He surveys the two on the ground; one still and quiet, the other groaning and cursing with his twisted arm. The officer sends in an ambulance call. Then he surveys with pleased intentness the regular face of Mike, cool and unperturbed.

“An Irish Sheeny!” softly comments the officer to himself.

He is expert of faces, is the officer, and deduces Mike’s two-ply origin from his yellow hair, dark eye and curved nose.

“You’re part Irish and part Jew,” observes the policeman.

“My mother was from Ireland,” answers Mike; “my father was a Spanish Jew from Salamanca. I think that’s what they call it, although I was not old enough when he died to remember much about him.”

“Irish crossed on Jew!” comments the officer, still in a mood of thoughtful admiration. “It’s the best prize-ring strain in the world!” The officer is in his dim way a patron of sport.

Mike thanks the other; for, while by no means clearly understanding, he feels that a compliment is meant. Then Mike goes homeward to Mollie and little Davy.

It is the twenty-third of December—two days before Christmas—when we are first made friends of Mike Menares. About a month before, the little family of three fell upon bad days. Mike was dismissed by the great grocers, and the six dollars weekly from that quarter came to an end. Mike’s delivery wagon was run down and crushed by a car; and, while Mike was not to blame, the grocers have no time to discover a justice, and Mike was told to go.

For mere food and light and fire, Mike’s other six Saturday dollars from Professor O’Punch would with economy provide. But there is the rent on New Year’s day! Also, and more near, is Christmas, with not a penny to spare. It must perforce be a bare festival, this Christmas. It will be a blow to little Davy of the crutch, who has talked only of Christmas for two months past and gone.

Mike, as has been intimated, is dull and slow of brain. He has just enough of education to be able to read and write. He owns no bad habits—no habits at all, in fact; and the one great passion of his simple heart is love without a limit for Mollie and little Davy. He lives for them; the least of their desires is the great concern of Mike’s life. Therefore, when his income shrinks from twelve dollars to six, it creeps up on him and chills him as a loss to Mollie and Davy. And peculiarly does this sorrowful business of a ruined Christmas for Davy prey on poor Mike.

“You and I won’t mind,” says housewife Mollie, looking up in Mike’s face with the sage dignity of her eleven years, “because we’re old enough to understand; but I feel bad about little Davy. It’s the first real awful Christmas we’ve ever had.”

Mollie is as bright and wise as Mike is dull. Seven years her senior, still Mike has grown to believe in and rely altogether on Mollie as a guide. He takes her commands without question, and does her will like a slave. To Mollie goes every one of Mike’s dollars; it is Mollie who disposes of them, while Mike never gives them a thought. They have been devoted to the one purpose of Mike’s labors; they have gone to Mollie and little Davy of the crutch; why, then, should Mike pursue them further?

Following housewife Mollie’s regrets over a sad Christmas that was not because of their poverty to be a Christmas, Mike sits solemnly by the window looking out on the gathering gloom and hurrying holiday crowds of Pitt Street. The folk are all poor; yet each seems able to do a bit for Christmas. As they hurry by, with small bundles and parcels, and now and then a basket from which protrude mayhap a turkey’s legs or other symptom of the victory of Christmas, Mike, in the midst of his sluggish amiabilities, discovers a sense of pain—a darkish thought of trouble.

And as if grief were to sharpen his wits, Mike has for almost a first and last time an original idea. It is the thought natural enough, when one reflects on Mike’s engagements, evening in and evening out, with Professor O’Punch.