“Who did it?” sobbed Pretty Agnes. “Mike never handed it to himself.”.
“Who did it?” repeated the Dropper, bitterly. “Th' chinks did it. It's for Low Foo's laundry.”
“You're down wrong, Dropper,” said old Jimmy. “It's that Ling Tchen trick. I knew them Hip Sings would get Mike.”
XII.—THE GOING OF BIFF ELLISON
The jury returned a verdict of guilty. Thereupon the judge, fixing Ellison with hard and thoughtful eye, gave him “from eight to twenty years.” When a man gets “from eight to twenty years” he is worth writing about. He would be worth writing about, even though it had been for such crimes of the commonplace as poke-getting at a ferry or sticking up a drunken sailor. And Ellison was found guilty of manslaughter.
Razor Riley would have been sentenced along with Ellison, only he had conveniently died. When the Gophers gather themselves together, they give various versions of Razor Riley's taking off. Some say he perished of pneumonia. Others lay it to a bullet in his careless mouth. In any case, he was dead, and therefore couldn't, in the nature of things, accompany Ellison to Sing Sing.
Razor was a little one-hundred-and-ten-pound man, with weak muscles and a heart of fire. He had, razorwise, cut and slashed his way into much favorable mention, when that pneumonia or bullet—whichever it was—stopped short his career.
While the width of the city apart, he and Ellison were ever friends. They drank together, fought together, and held their foes as they held their money, in common.