Stories for Boys

by Richard Harding Davis

And when Grace exhibits the many prizes he has won, they say that it is this cup which he did not win that he handles most tenderly and shows with the greatest pride.

THE JUMP AT COREY’S SLIP.

The jump from Corey’s slip was never made but by two of the Brick Dust Gang, and though, as it turned out, they were not sorry they had taken it, they served as a warning to all the others of the gang against trying to emulate their daring.

Corey’s slip, as everybody knows, is part of Corey’s brick-yard, on the East side, near the Twenty-sixth street wharf, and the Brick Dust Gang are so called because they have a hidden meeting-place among the high piles of bricks which none of the other boys, nor the police, nor even the employees of the brick-yard have been able to find. It is known to exist, though, and the gang meet there to smoke and play the accordion and gamble for cigarette pictures, and to pursue such other sinful and demoralizing practices of East side youth as they elect.

The Brick Dust Gang must not be confounded with the Rag Gang of “The Bay,” near Thirty-third street, for, while the Rag Gang are thieves and toughs, the Brick Dust Gang are too young to be very wicked, and their “folks” are too respectable to let them go very far astray. The gang got along very well during the winter months, and the hole in the bricks was filled every afternoon after the public schools had closed, with from a dozen to twenty of them.

Buck Mooney was the leader, and no one disputed his claim, for he was a born leader in some respects, just as was his father, who could throw the votes of the Luke J. Mooney Star Social Club wherever they would do himself and the party the most good. But his son Buck was quick-tempered and stronger than he knew, and he had a way of knocking the younger and less pugilistic members of his crowd around which was injudicious; for by this he hurt his own popularity as well as their heads.

He was no bully though, and there was no one who could lead him in any show of physical prowess recognized and practised by the gang. So all through the winter he was easily the leader, and no one stood against him. His fall came in the spring. The coming of the spring meant more to the Brick Dust Gang than to almost any other crowd along the river front, for their knowledge of the brick-yard and its wharf enabled them to bathe in the river quite hidden from the police at any hour of the day, and this means a great deal to those who have felt the stifling heat of the tenements along the East River.

They bathed and swam and dived from the first of May until the autumn came and gave the water such a sharpness that they left it numbed and with chattering teeth, and they began at five in the morning and kept it up late into the night. They lived in the water, and were rather more at home in it than they were on the streets. The workmen in the brick-yard never interfered with them, because the boys helped them in piling the bricks and in unloading the scows and loading the carts; and the police could never catch them, for the reason that the boys always kept a part of the gang posted as sentinels in the yard.

Mooney and Tommy Grant were easily the best swimmers in the crowd. Tommy was four years younger than the leader, and small and consumptive-looking; but he was absurdly strong for his size, and his body was as hard and muscular as a jockey’s. The trouble began between the two at the swimming-match at Harlem for all comers, where they both entered for the one-mile race with a turn. The Harlem boys were not in it from the first, and the two down-town boys led all the others by a hundred yards. “The little fellow,” as Tommy was called by the crowds on the shore, was the popular favorite; and the crowd was delighted when he came plunging in ahead, swimming so much under water that only one bare shoulder and revolving arm told where he was.

Buck Mooney, the leader of the gang, was a bad second and a bad loser as well. He swore a great deal when his backers pulled him out of the water, and gave every reason for Tommy’s success, except that Tommy could swim faster than he could.