The Apaches of New York

by Alfred Henry Lewis

And McTaffe stormed. Going farther, and by way of corrective climax, he knocked Leoni down with a club. After which—according to eye-witnesses, who spoke without prejudice—he proceeded to beat her up for fair.

Leoni told her adventures to Casey, and showed him what a harvest of bruises her love for him had garnered. Casey, who hadn't been born and brought up in Mulberry Bend to become a leading light of Gangland for nothing, took his gun and issued forth on the trail of McTaffe. McTaffe left town. Also, that he didn't take his mob with him proved that not graft, but fear of Casey, was the bug beneath the chip of his disappearance.

“He's sherried,” Casey told Leoni, when that ill-used beauty asked if he had avenged her bruises. “But he'll blow in ag'in; an' when he does I'll cook him.”

Goldie Louie came up from Chihuahua, his yellow hair shot with gray, the prison pallor in the starved hollows of his cheeks. Mexicans are the most merciless of jailers. Fog-eye Howard, who was nothing if not a gossip, wised him up as to Leoni's love for Casey. In that connection Fog-eye related how McTaffe, having rebuked Leoni's heart wanderings with that convincing club, had now become a fugitive from Casey's gun.

Having heard Fog-eye to the end, Goldie faithfully hunted up Leoni and wore out a second club on her himself. Again did Leoni creep to Casey with her woes and her wrongs, and again did that Knight of Mulberry Bend gird up his fierce loins to avenge her.

Let us step rearward a pace.

After the Committee of Fourteen, in its uneasy purities, had caused Chick Tricker's Park Row license to be revoked, Tricker, seeking a livelihood, became the owner of the Stag in Twenty-eighth Street, just off Broadway. That license revocation had been a financial jolt, and now in new quarters, with Berlin Auggy, whom he had brought with him as partner, he was striving, in every way not likely to invoke police interference to re-establish his prostrate destiny.

It was the evening next after the one upon which Goldie Louie, following the example of the vanished McTaffe, had expressed club-wise his disapproval of Leoni's love for Casey. The Stag was a riot of life and light and laughter; music and conversation and drink prevailed. In the rear room—fenced off from the bar by swinging doors—was Goldie Louie, together with Fog-eye Howard, Brother Bill Orr and Sanky Dunn. There, too, Whitey Dutch was entertaining certain of the choicest among the Five Pointers. Scattered here and there were Little Red, the Baltimore Rat, Louis Buck, Stager Bennett, Jack Cohalan, the Humble Dutchman, and others of renown in the grimy chivalry of crime. There were fair ones, too, and the silken sex found dulcet representation in such unchallenged belles as Pretty Agnes, Jew Yetta, Dutch Ida, and Anna Gold. True, an artist in womanly beauty might have found defects in each of these. And if so? Venus had a mole on her cheek, Helen a scar on her chin.

Tricker was not with his guests at the Stag that night. His father had been reported sick, and Tricker was in filial attendance at the Fourteenth Street bedside of his stricken sire. In his absence, Auggy took charge, and under his genial management beer flowed, coin came in, and all Stag things went moving merrily.

Whitey Dutch, speaking to Stagger Bennett concerning Pioggi, aforetime put away in the Elmira Reformatory for the Coney Island killing of Cyclone Louie and Kid Twist, made quite a tale of how Pioggi, having served his time, had again shown up in town. Whitey mentioned, as a matter for general congratulation, that Pioggi's Elmira experience had not robbed him of his right to vote, as would have been the blighting case had he gone to Sing Sing.