II. – THE BABY’S FINGERS

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.

Not that Spanish had been arrested for the baby’s lost fingers. That story in the telling came later, although the wrong it registered had happened months before. Dribben and Blum picked him up – as a piece of work it did them credit – for what occurred in Mersher Miller’s place.

As all the world knows, Mersher Miller, or as he is called among his intimates, Mersher the Strong-Arm, conducts a beer house at 171 Norfolk Street. It was a placid April evening, and Mersher’s brother, as bottle-tosser, was busy behind the bar. Mersher himself was not in, which – for Mersher – may or may not have been greatly to the good.

Spanish came into the place. His hat was low-drawn over his black eyes. Mersher’s brother, wiping glasses, didn’t know him.

“Where’s Mersher?” asked Spanish.

“Not here,” quoth Mersher’s brother.

“You’ll do,” returned Spanish. “Give me ten dollars out of the damper.”

Mersher’s brother held this proposal in finance to be foolishly impossible, and was explicit on that head. He insisted, not without scorn, that he was the last man in the world to give a casual caller ten dollars out of the damper or anything else.

“I’ll be back,” replied Spanish, “an’ I bet then you’ll give me that ten-spot.”

“That’s Johnny Spanish,” declared a bystander, when Spanish, muttering his discontent, had gone his threatening way.

Mersher’s brother doubted it. He had heard of Spanish, but had never seen him. It was his understanding that Spanish was not in town at all, having lammistered some time before.

“He’s wanted be th’ cops,” Mersher’s brother argued. “You don’t suppose he’s sucker enough to walk into their mitts? He wouldn’t dare show up in town.”

“Don’t con yourself,” replied the bystander, who had a working knowledge of Gangland and its notables. “That’s Spanish, all right. He was out of town, but not because of the bulls. It’s the Dropper he’s leary of; an’ now th’ Dropper’s in hock he’s chased back. You heard what he said about comin’ ‘round ag’in? Take my tip an’ rib yourself up wit’ a rod. That Spanish is a tough kid!”

The evening wore on at Mersher’s; one hour, two hours, three went peaceably by. The clock pointed to eleven.

Without warning a lowering figure appeared at the door.

“There he is!” exclaimed the learned bystander. Then he added with a note of pride, albeit shaky as to voice: “What did I tell youse?”

The figure in the doorway strode forward. It was Spanish. A second figure – hat over eyes – . followed hard on his heels. With a flourish, possible only to the close student of Mr. Beadle’s dime literature, Spanish drew two Colt’s pistols.

“Come through wit’ that ten!” said he to Mersher’s brother.

Mersher’s brother came through, and came through swiftly.

“I thought so!” sneered Spanish, showing his side teeth like a dog whose feelings have been hurt. “Now come through wit’ th’ rest!”

Mersher’s brother eagerly gave him the contents of the cash drawer – about eighty dollars.

Spanish, having pocketed the money, wheeled upon the little knot of customers, who, after the New York manner when crime is afoot, had stood motionless with no thought of interfering.

“Hands up! Faces to the wall!” cried Spanish. “Everybody’s dough looks good to me to-night!”

The customers, acting in such concert that it seemed as though they’d been rehearsed, hands held high, turned their faces to the wall.

“You keep them covered,” said Spanish to his dark companion in arms, “while I go through ‘em.”

The dark companion leveled his own pistol in a way calculated to do the most harm, and Spanish reaped an assortment of cheap watches and a handful of bills.

Spanish came round on Mersher’s brother. The latter had stooped down until his eyes were on a par with the bar.

“Now,” said Spanish to Mersher’s brother, “I might as well cook you. I’ve no use for barkeeps, anyway, an’ besides you’re built like a pig an’ I don’t like your looks!”

Spanish began to shoot, and Mersher’s brother began to dodge. Ducking and dodging, the latter ran the length of the bar, Spanish faithfully following with his bullets. There were two in the ice box, two through the mirror, five in the top of the bar. Each and all, they had been too late for Mersher’s brother, who, pale as a candle, emerged from the bombardment breathing heavily but untouched.

“An’ this,” cried Ikey the pawnbroker, ten minutes after Spanish had disappeared – Ikey was out a red watch and sixty dollars – “an’ this iss vat Mayor Gaynor calls ‘outvard order an’ decency’!”

It was upon the identification of the learned bystander that Dribben and Blum went to work, and it was for that stick-up in Mersher’s the two made the collar.

“It’s lucky for you guys,” said Spanish, his eye sparkling venomously like the eye of a snake – “it’s lucky for you guys that you got me wit’out me guns. I’d have croaked one of you bulls sure, an’ maybe both, an’ then took th’ Dutch way out me-self.”

The Dutch way out, with Spanish and his immediate circle, means suicide, it being a belief among them that the Dutch are a melancholy brood, and favor suicide as a means of relief when the burdens of life become more than they can bear.

Spanish, however, did not have his gun when he was pinched, and therefore did not croak Dribben and Blum, and do the Dutch act for himself. Dribben and Blum are about their daily duties as thief takers, as this is read, while Spanish is considering nature from between the Sing Sing bars. Dribben and Blum say that, even if Spanish had had his guns, he would neither have croaked them nor come near it, and in what bluffs he put up to that lethal effect he was talking through his hat. For myself, I say nothing, neither one way nor the other, except that Dribben and Blum are bold and enterprising officers, and Spanish is the very heart of quenchless desperation.

By word of my Central Office informant, Spanish has seen twenty-two years and wasted most of them. His people dwell somewhere in the wilds of Long Island, and are as respectable as folk can be on two dollars a day. Spanish did not live with his people, preferring the city, where he cut a figure in Suffolk, Norfolk, Forsyth, Hester, Grand, and other East Side avenues.

At one time Spanish had a gallery number, and his picture held an important place in Central Office regard. It was taken out during what years the inadequate Bingham prevailed as Commissioner of Police. A row arose over a youth named Duffy, who was esteemed by an eminent Judge. Duffy’s picture was in the gallery, and the judge demanded its removal. It being inconvenient to refuse the judge, young Duffy’s picture was taken out; and since to make fish of one while making flesh of others might have invited invidious comment, some hundreds of pictures – among them that of Spanish – were removed at the same time.

It pleased Spanish vastly when his mug came out of the gallery. Not that its presence there was calculated to hurt his standing; not but what it was bound to go back as a certain incident of his method of life. Its removal was a wound to police vanity; and, hating the police, he found joy in whatsoever served to wring their azure withers.

When, according to the rules of Bertillon, Spanish was thumb-printed, mugged and measured, the police described him on their books as Pickpocket and Fagin. The police affirmed that he not only worked the Broadway rattlers in his own improper person, but – paying a compliment to his genius for organization – that he had drawn about himself a group of children and taught them to steal for his sinful use. It is no more than truth to say, however, that never in New York City was Spanish convicted as either a Fagin or a pickpocket, and the police – as he charges – may have given him these titles as a cover for their ignorance, which some insist is of as deep an indigo as the hue of their own coats.

Spanish was about seventeen when he began making an East Side stir. He did not yearn to be respectable. He had borne witness to the hard working respectability of his father and mother, and remembered nothing as having come from it more than aching muscles and empty pockets. Their clothes were poor, their house was poor, their table poor. Why should he fret himself with ideals of the respectable?

Work?

It didn’t pay.

In his blood, too, flowed malignant cross-currents, which swept him towards idleness and all manner of violences.

Nor did the lesson of the hour train him in selfrestraint. All over New York City, in Fifth Avenue, at the Five Points, the single cry was, Get the Money! The rich were never called upon to explain their prosperity. The poor were forever being asked to give some legal reason for their poverty. Two men in a magistrate’s court are fined ten dollars each. One pays, and walks free; the other doesn’t, and goes to the Island. Spanish sees, and hears, and understands.

“Ah!” cries he, “that boob went to the Island not for what he did but for not having ten bones!”

And the lesson of that thunderous murmur – reaching from the Battery to Kingsbridge – of Get the Money! rushes upon him; and he makes up his mind to heed it. Also, there are uncounted scores like Spanish, and other uncounted scores with better coats than his, who are hearing and seeing and reasoning the same way.

Spanish stood but five feet three, and his place was among the lightweights. Such as the Dropper, who tilted the scales at 180, and whose name of Dropper had been conferred upon him because every time he hit a man he dropped him – such as Ike the Blood, as hard and heavy as the Dropper and whose title of the Blood had not been granted in any spirit of factitiousness – laughed at him. What matter that his heart was high, his courage proof? Physically, he could do nothing with these dangerous ones – as big as dangerous! And so, ferociously ready to even things up, he began packing a rod.

While Spanish, proceeding as best he might by his dim standards, was struggling for gang eminence and dollars, Alma, round, dark, vivacious, eyes as deep and soft and black as velvet, was the unchallenged belle of her Williamsburg set. Days she worked as a dressmaker, without getting rich. Nights she went to rackets, which are dances wide open and unfenced. Sundays she took in picnics, or rode up and down on the trolleys – those touring cars of the poor.

Spanish met Alma and worshipped her, for so was the world made. Being thus in love, while before he, Spanish, had only needed money, now he had to have it. For love’s price to a man is money, just as its price to a woman is tears.

Casting about for ways and means, Spanish’s money-hunting eye fell upon Jigger. Jigger owned a stuss-house in Forsyth Street, between Hester and Grand. Jigger was prosperous beyond the dreams of avarice. Multitudes, stabbing stuss, thronged his temple of chance. As a quick, sure way to amass riches, Spanish decided to become Jigger’s partner. Between them they would divide the harvest of Forsyth Street stuss.

The golden beauty of the thought lit up the dark face of Spanish with a smile that was like a splash of vicious sunshine. Alma, in the effulgence of her toilets, should overpower all rivalry! At rout and racket, he, Spanish, would lead the hard walk with her, and she should shine out upon Gangland fashion like a fire in a forest.

His soul having wallowed itself weary in these visions, Spanish sought Jigger as a step towards making the visions real. Spanish and his proposition met with obstruction. Jigger couldn’t see it, wouldn’t have it.

Spanish was neither astonished nor dismayed. He had foreseen the Jiggerian reluctance, and was organized to break it down. When Jigger declined his proffered partnership – in which he, Jigger, must furnish the capital while Spanish contributed only his avarice – and asked, “Why should I?” he, Spanish, was ready with an answer.

“Why should you?” and Spanish repeated Jigger’s question so that his reply might have double force. “Because, if you don’t, I’ll bump youse off.” Gangland is so much like Missouri that you must always be prepared to show it. Gangland takes nothing on trust. And, if you try to run a bluff, it calls you. Spanish wore a low-browed, sullen, sour look. But he had killed no one, owned no dread repute, and Jigger was used to sullen, sour, lowbrowed looks. Thus, when Spanish spoke of bumping Jigger off, that courtier of fortune, full of a case-hardened scepticism, laughed low and long and mockingly. He told the death-threatening Spanish to come a-running.

Spanish didn’t come a-running, but he came much nearer it than Jigger liked. Crossing up with the perverse Jigger the next evening, at the corner of Forsyth and Grand, he opened upon that obstinate stuss dealer with a Colt’s-38. Jigger managed to escape, but little Sadie Rotin, otat eight, was killed. Jigger, who was unarmed, could not return the fire. Spanish, confused and flurried, doubtless, by the poor result of his gun-play, betook himself to flight.

The police did not get Spanish; but in Gangland the incident did him little good. At the Ajax Club, and in other places where the best blood of the gangs was wont to unbuckle and give opinions, such sentiment-makers as the Dropper, Ike the Blood, Kid Kleiney, Little Beno, Fritzie Rice, Kid Strauss, the Humble Dutchman, Zamo, and the Irish Wop, held but one view. Such slovenly work was without precedent as without apology. To miss Jigger aroused ridicule. But to go farther, and kill a child playing in the street, spelled bald disgrace. Thereafter no self-respecting lady would drink with Spanish, no gentleman of gang position would return his nod. He would be given the frozen face at the rackets, the icy eye in the streets.

To be sure, his few friends, contending feebly, insisted that it wasn’t Spanish who had killed the little Rotin girl. When Spanish cracked off his rod at Jigger, others had caught the spirit. A half dozen guns – they said – had been set blazing; and it was some unknown practitioner who had shot down the little Rotin girl. What were the heart-feelings of father and mother Rotin, to see their baby killed, did not appeal as a question to either the friends or foes of Spanish. Gangland is interested only in dollars or war.