Having read, I fell back in my chair and laughed crazily at the joke that was “on me.” Then I thanked God for the child. And then I wrote a check for all the money I had, went to my last victim at once, told him everything, handed him my check and his hundred dollars—to spend in charity but not by way of gifts to pledgers, and fell into unconsciousness.
From that hour on I have been dying in a hospital bed. My daughter has received my consent, and the young priest will send her her father’s love and last blessing when I am dead, in a day or so. And I shall die in peace.
Very truly yours,
The ex-King of the Pledgers.
A PO-LICE-MAN
By Lincoln Steffens
“Chief,” said Mickey Sweeney, police reporter, to the Chief of Police, “my paper wants th’ goods to prove whether that red-headed crook, Captain Mahoney, is a crook or an honest man.”
The Chief was about to light a cigar. He blew out the match and turned an anxious face to Mickey. Twice the reporter had saved his official life. There was nothing he would not tell him, if he really wanted to know it, nothing. He looked at the boy darkly, then he looked away, off across the humming restaurant, off across the humming years, and the Chief’s face cleared.
“Mickey,” he said, “when I was young, younger than you, and a green cop, greener than you, I was posted on Sixth Avenue, east side, between Twenty-eighth Street and Thirty-three. The heart of the Tenderloin. And my beat beat with the beat of the blood of it; an th’ life; an’ th’ death. One night, one of my first nights, a fly cabman—one of them nighthawks that picked up drunks to take ’em home and took ’em instead to th’ Park and robbed ’em; I wasn’t onto th’ game then, but because of th’ tips they give th’ police about other crooks, we let them operate—well, this night-hawk drives up close to th’ curb by me, and says:
“‘Hey, Bill,’ he whispers, hoarse, ‘there’s murder an’ riot in th’ Half Shell.’