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?”
VI.—HOW JACKEEN SLEW THE DOC
In person he was tall, languid, slender, as neat as a cat, and his sallow face—over which had settled the opium pallor—was not an ugly face. Also, there abode such weakness, some good, and no harm in him. His constitution was rickety. In the winter he coughed and invited pneumonia; in the summer, when the sun poured down, he trembled on the brink of a stroke. But neither pneumonia nor sunstroke ever quite killed him.
It was written that Jackeen would do that—Jackeen Dalton, alias Brady; and Jackeen did it with five bullets from an automatic-38. Some said that opium was at the bottom of it; others laid it to love. It is still greatly talked over in what pipe joints abound in Mott, Pell and Doyers, not to mention the wider Catherine Street, in the neighborhood of number Nineteen, where he had his flat and received his friends.
They called him the Doc. Twenty years ago the Doc studied dentistry with his father, who flourished reputably as a tooth surgeon at the Troy Dental Parlors in Roosevelt Street. The father died before the Doc had been given a diploma; and the Doc, having meanwhile picked up the opium habit, was never able afterwards to see the use. Why should he be examined or ask for a license? What foolishness! Magnanimously waving aside every thought of the sort, he plunged into the practice of his cheerless art among those who went in and out of Chinatown, and who lived precariously by pocket-picking, porch-climbing, safe-blowing and all-round strong-arm methods; and, careless of the statute in such case made and provided, he proceeded to file and drill and cap and fill and bridge and plug and pull their aching cuspids, bicuspids and molars, and all with as quick an instinct and as deft a touch as though his eyes were sharpened and his hand made steady by the dental sheepskins of a dozen colleges. That he was an outlaw among tooth-drawers served only to knit him more closely to the hearts of his patients—themselves merest outlaws among men.