“No harm done, I think?” said I, when we were both ashore again.
“I lose-a my knife,” said he with a grin, the water dripping from his hair. He was pointing to the empty scabbard at his belt where he had carried a sheath-knife.
“It was my blunder,” said I, “and if you'll hunt me up at Big Kennedy's this evening I'll have another for you.”
That afternoon, at a pawnshop in the Bowery, I bought a strange-looking weapon, that was more like a single-edged dagger than anything else. It had a buck-horn haft, and was heavy and long, with a blade of full nine inches.
My Sicilian came, as I had told him, and I gave him the knife. He was extravagant in his gratitude.
“You owe me nothing!” he cried. “It is I who owe for my life that you save. But I shall take-a the knife to remember how you pull me out. You good-a man; some day I pull you out—mebby so! who knows?”
With that he was off for the docks again, leaving me neither to hear nor to think of him thereafter for a stirring handful of years.
It occurred to me as strange, even in a day when I gave less time to thought than I do now, that my first impulse as an alderman should be one of revenge. There was that police captain, who, in the long ago, offered insult to Anne, when she came to beg for my liberty. “Better get back to your window,” said he, “or all the men will have left the street!” The memory of that evil gibe had never ceased to burn me with the hot anger of a coal of fire, and now I resolved for his destruction.
When I told Big Kennedy, he turned the idea on his wheel of thought for full two minutes.
“It's your right,” said he at last. “You've got the ax; you're entitled to his head. But say! pick him up on proper charges; get him dead to rights! That aint hard, d'ye see, for he's as crooked as a dog's hind leg. To throw him for some trick he's really turned will bunco these reform guys into thinkin' that we're on th' level.”