Having loved Crazy Barry for a space, Leoni turned cool, then cold, then fell away from him altogether. At this, Crazy Barry, himself a volcano of sensibility, with none of Leoni's saving genius to grow cold, waxed wroth and chafed.
While in this mixed and storm-tossed humor, he came upon Leoni in the company of a fellow gonoph known as McTafife. In testimony of what hell-pangs were tearing at his soul, Crazy Barry fell upon McTaffe, and cut him into red ribbons with a knife. He would have cut his throat, and spoke of doing so, but was prevailed upon to refrain by Kid Jacobs, who pointed out the electrocutionary inconveniences sure to follow such a ceremony.
“They'd slam youse in th' chair, sure!” was the sober-headed way that Jacobs put it.
Crazy Barry, one hand in McTafife's hair, had drawn the latter's head across his knee, the better to attend to the throat-cutting. Convinced, however, by the words of Jacobs, he let the head, throat all unslashed, fall heavily to the floor. After which, first wiping the blood from his knife on McTafife's coat—for he had an instinct to be neat—he lam-mistered for parts unknown, while McTafife was conveyed to the New York Hospital. This chanced in the Sixth Avenue temple of entertainment kept by the late Paddy the Pig.
Once out of the hospital and into the street, McTafife and the fair Leoni found no trouble in being all the world to one another. Crazy Barry was a thing of the past and, since the Central Office dicks wanted him, likely to remain so.
McTafife was of the swell mob. He worked with Goldie Louie, Fog-eye Howard and Brother Bill Orr. Ask any Central Office bull, half learned in his trade of crook-catcher, and he'll tell you that these names are of a pick-purse peerage. McTaffe himself was the stinger, and personally pinched the poke, or flimped the thimble, or sprung the prop, of whatever boob was being trimmed. The others, every one a star, were proud to act as his stalls; and that, more than any Central Office assurance, should show how near the top was McTaffe in gonoph estimation.
Every profession has its drawbacks, and that of picking pockets possesses several. For one irritating element, it is apt to take the practitioner out of town for weeks on end. Some sucker puts up a roar, perhaps, and excites the assiduities of the police; or there is a prize fight at Reno, or a World's Fair at St. Louis, or a political convention at Chicago, or a crowd-gathering tour by some notable like Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Taft, which gives such promise of profit that it is not to be refused. Thus it befell that McTaffe, with his mob, was greatly abroad in the land, leaving Leoni deserted and alone.
Once McTaffe remained away so long that it caused Leoni uneasiness, if not alarm.
“Mack's fell for something,” was the way she set forth her fears to Big Kitty: “You can gamble he's in hock somewheres, or I'd have got the office from him by wire or letter long ago.”
When McTaffe at last came back, his face exhibited pain and defeat. He related how the mob had been caught in a jam in Chihuahua, and Goldie Louie lagged.