It was eight of the clock on the second evening when we gathered about the fire-place. The snow was still falling and roads were reported blocked beyond any thought of passage. We were snowbound; folk who should know declared that if a road were broken for our getting out within a week, it was the best we might look for.
No one seemed stricken of grief at this prison prospect. As we came about the cheery blaze, every face was easy and content. The Jolly Doctor joined the Red Nosed Gentleman in his burgundy, while the Sour Gentleman and the Old Cattleman qualified for the occasion with a copious account of whiskey, which the aged man of cows called “Nose-paint.” Sioux Sam and I were the only “abstainers”—I had ceased and he had never commenced—but as if to make up, we smoked a double number of cigars.
The Jolly Doctor began with the explanation that the incidents he would relate had fallen beneath his notice when as a student he walked the New York hospitals; then, glass in hand, he told us the tale of The Pitt Street Stringency.
CHAPTER VII.—THE PITT STREET STRINGENCY.
Another would-be sooicide, eh! Here, Kid,” to a sharp gamin who does errands and odd commissions for the house; “take this mut in where dey kills ’em.”
The speaker is a loud young man, clad in garments of violence. The derby tilted over eye, the black cigar jutting ceilingward at an agle of sixty degrees, the figured shirt whereof a dominating dye is angry red, the high collar and flash tie, with its cheap stone, all declare the Bowery. As if to prove the proposition announced of his costume, the young man is perched on a stool, the official ticket-seller of a Bowery theatre.
Mike Menares, whom the Bowery person alludes to as the “mut,” is a square-shouldered boy of eighteen; handsome he is as Apollo, yet with a slow, good-humored guilelessness of face. He has come on business bent. That mighty pugilist, the Dublin Terror, is nightly on the stage, offering two hundred dollars to any amateur among boxers who shall remain before him four Queensberry rounds. Mike Menares, he of the candidly innocent countenance, desires to proffer himself as a sacrifice.
“Youse is just in time, sport,” remarks the brisk gamin to whom Mike has been committed, as he pilots the guileless one to the stage door. “It’s nine o’clock now, an’ d’ Terror goes on to do his bag-t’umpin’ turn at ten. After that comes d’ knockin’ out, see! But say! if youse was tired of livin’, why didn’t you jump in d’ East river? I’d try d’ river an’d’ morgue before I’d come here to be murdered be d’ Terror.”