In finding his way out of Doyers Street, Tricker stopped for a moment in a little doggery from which came the tump-tump of a piano and the scuffle of a dance. The room, not thirty feet long, was cut in two by a ramshackle partition. On the grimy wall hung a placard which carried this moderate warning:
The management seemed to be in the hands of a morose personage, as red as a boiled lobster, who acted behind the bar. The piano was of that flat, tin-pan tone which bespeaks the veteran. It was drummed upon by a bleary virtuoso, who at sight of Tricker—for whose favor he yearned—began banging forth a hurly-burly that must have set on edge the teeth of every piano in the vicinity. The darky who was dancing redoubled his exertions. Altogether, Tricker's entrance was not without éclat. Not that he seemed impressed as, flinging himself into a chair, he listlessly called for apollinaris.
“What do youse pay him?” asked Tricker of the boiled barkeeper, indicating as he did so the hardworking colored person.
“Pad-money!”—with a slighting glance. “Pad-money; an' it's twict too much.”
Pad-money means pay for a bed.
“Well, I should say so!” coincided Tricker, with the weary yet lofty manner of one who is a judge.
In one corner were two women and a trio of men. The men were thieves of the cheap grade known as lush-workers. These beasts of prey lie about the East Side grog shops, and when some sailor ashore leaves a place, showing considerable slant, they tail him and take all he has. They will plunder their victim in sight of a whole street. No one will tell. The first lesson of Gangland is never to inform nor give evidence. One who does is called snitch; and the wages of the snitch is death. The lush-workers pay a percentage of their pillage, to what saloons they infest, for the privilege of lying in wait.