The Apaches of New York

One o’clock.

Tony began to think about locking his front door. This, out of respect for the law. Not that beer and revelry were to cease in Number Twelve, but because such was Tony’s understanding with the precinct skipper. Some reformer might come snooping else, and lodge complaint against that skipper with the Commissioner of Police.

Just as Tony, on bidding “Good-bye!” to Mrs. Vee and her purple fluttering flock, had been impressed by the crowded condition of Pell Street, so now, when he made ready to lock up, was he impressed by that causeway’s profound emptiness.

“Say,” he cried to his guests in the rear, “you stews come here! This is funny; there ain’t a chink in sight!”

“D’youse think th’ bulls are gettin’ ready for a raid?” asked Sop Henry. Sop, with the Nailer and the Wop, had joined Tony in the door. “Perhaps there’s somethin’ doin’ over at th’ Elizabeth Street station, an’ the wardman’s passed th’ monks th’ tip.”

“Nothin’ in that,” responded Tony, confidently. “Wouldn’t I be put wise, too?”

Marvelling much, Tony fastened his door, and joined old Jimmy, Pretty Agnes and the others in the rear room. When he got there, he found old Jimmy sniffing with suspicious nose, and swearing he smelled gas.

“One of your pipes is leakin’, Tony,” said Jimmy, “leakin’ for fair, too, or I’m a Dago!”

Tony, in refutation, called attention to a patent truth. He used electric light, not gas.

“But they use gas upstairs,” he added. Then, half-anxiously; “It can’t be some hop-head has blown out the gas?”

The thought was enough to start the Dropper, ever full of enterprise.

“Let’s have a look,” said he. “Nailer you an’ th’ Wop come wit’ me.”

Tony again opened the front door, and the Dropper, followed by the Wop and the Nailer, filed into the stairway that led to the floor above. They made noise enough, blundering and stumbling in the sudden hurry of spirit which had gripped them. As they reached the landing near Mike’s door, the odor of gas was even more pronounced than in Tony’s rear room.

The hall was blind black with the thick darkness that filled it.

“How about this?” queried the Dropper. “I thought a gas jet was always boinin’ in th’ hall.”

The Dropper, growing fearful, hung back. With that, the Wop pushed forward and took the lead. Only for a moment. Giving a cry, he sprang back with such sudden force that he sent the Dropper headlong down the stairs.

“Th’ Virgin save us!” exclaimed the Wop, “but I touched somethin’ soft!”

“What’s th’ row?” demanded Tony, coming to the foot of the stairs.

At the Dropper’s request, Tony brought a candle, used by him in excursions to those crypts wherein he kept his whiskey.

In a moment all was plain. That something soft which had so told upon the Wop was a rubber tube. There was a gas jet in the hall. One end of the rubber tube had been fastened over the gas jet, and the other stuffed into the keyhole of Mike’s door. Trap arranged, the gas had been set flowing full blast.

“Well, what do youse think of that?” exclaimed Tony, who understood at a glance.

With one swift move, Tony turned off the gas and tore away the rubber tube. There was no talk of keys. He placed his powerful shoulder against the door, and sent it crashing. The out-rush of gas drove them, choking and gasping, into the open air.

“Take it from me,” said the Dropper, as soon as he could get his breath, “they’ve croaked Mike.”

“But the window,” urged the Nailer; “mebbe Mike has the window open!”

“Not a chance!” retorted the Dropper. “No one has his window up while he hits th’ pipe. They don’t jibe, fresh air an’ dope.”

The Dropper was right. Big Mike, stark and still and yellow, lay dead in his bed – the last place his friends would have anticipated – poisoned by gas.

“Better notify th’ cops,” advised Jimmy, the practical.

“Who did it?” sobbed Pretty Agnes. “Mike never handed it to himself.”.

“Who did it?” repeated the Dropper, bitterly. “Th’ chinks did it. It’s for Low Foo’s laundry.”

“You’re down wrong, Dropper,” said old Jimmy. “It’s that Ling Tchen trick. I knew them Hip Sings would get Mike.”

XII. – THE GOING OF BIFF ELLISON

The jury returned a verdict of guilty. Thereupon the judge, fixing Ellison with hard and thoughtful eye, gave him “from eight to twenty years.” When a man gets “from eight to twenty years” he is worth writing about. He would be worth writing about, even though it had been for such crimes of the commonplace as poke-getting at a ferry or sticking up a drunken sailor. And Ellison was found guilty of manslaughter.

Razor Riley would have been sentenced along with Ellison, only he had conveniently died. When the Gophers gather themselves together, they give various versions of Razor Riley’s taking off. Some say he perished of pneumonia. Others lay it to a bullet in his careless mouth. In any case, he was dead, and therefore couldn’t, in the nature of things, accompany Ellison to Sing Sing.

Razor was a little one-hundred-and-ten-pound man, with weak muscles and a heart of fire. He had, razorwise, cut and slashed his way into much favorable mention, when that pneumonia or bullet – whichever it was – stopped short his career.

While the width of the city apart, he and Ellison were ever friends. They drank together, fought together, and held their foes as they held their money, in common.

When the jury said “Guilty,” it filled Ellison with resentful amazement. His angry wonder grew as the judge coldly mentioned that “from eight to-twenty years.” He couldn’t understand! The politicians had promised to save him. It was only upon such assurance that he had concluded to return. Safe in Baltimore, he could have safely continued in Baltimore. Lured by false lights, misled by spurious promises, he had come back to get “from eight to twenty years!” Cray and Savage rounded him up. All his life a cop-fighter, he would have given those Central Office stars a battle, had he realized what was in store for him and how like a rope of sand were the promises of politicians!

My own introduction to Ellison and Razor Riley was in the Jefferson Market court. That was several years ago. The day was the eighteenth of March, and Magistrate Corrigan had invited me to a seat on the bench. Ellison and Razor were arraigned for disorderly conduct. They had pushed in the door of a Sixth Avenue bird and animal store, kept by an agitated Italian, and in the language of the officer who made the collar, “didn’t do a thing to it.”

“They are guilty, your honor,” said their lawyer, manner deprecatory and full of conciliation, with a view to softening the magisterial heart – “they are guilty. And yet there is this in their defense. They had been celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day, over-celebrating it, perhaps, your honor, and they didn’t know what they were about. That’s the mere truth, your honor. Befuddled by too much and too fervently celebrating the glorious day, they really didn’t know what they were about.”

The lawyer waved a virtuous hand, as one who submitted affairs to the mercy of an enlightened court.

Magistrate Corrigan was about to impose sentence, when the agitated Italian broke forth.

“Don’t I get-a my chance, judge?” he called out. “Certainly,” returned Magistrate Corrigan, “what is it you want to say?”

“Judge, that-a guy” – pointing the finger of rebuttal at the lawyer – “he say theese mans don’t know what-a they do. One lie! They know what-a they do all right. I show you, judge. They smash-a th’ canaries, they knock-a th’ blocks off-a th’ monks, they tear-a th’ tails out of th’ macaws, but” – here his voice rose to a screech – “they nevair touch-a th’ bear.”

Magistrate Corrigan glanced at the policeman. The latter explained that, while Ellison and Razor had spread wreck and havoc among the monkeys and macaws, they had avoided even a remotest entanglement with a huge cinnamon bear, chained in the center of the room. They had prudently plowed ‘round the bear.

“Twenty-five and costs!” said Magistrate Corrigan, a smile touching the corners of his mouth. Then, raising a repressive palm towards the lawyer, who betrayed symptoms of further oratory: “Not a word. Your people get off very lightly. Upon the point you urge that these men didn’t know what they were about, the testimony of our Italian friend is highly convincing.”

When a gentleman goes to Sing Sing for longer than five years, it is Gangland good manners to speak of him in the past tense. Thus, then, shall I speak of Ellison. His name, properly laid down, was James Ellison. As, iron on wrists, a deputy at his elbow, he stepped aboard the train, he gave his age as thirty-nine.

His monaker of Biff came to him in the most natural way in the world. Gangland is ever ready to bestow a title. Therefore, when a recalcitrant customer of Fat Flynn’s, having quaffed that publican’s beer and then refused to pay for it, was floored as flat as a flounder by a round blow from Ellison’s fist, Gangland, commemorating the event, renamed him Biff.

Ellison was in his angular, awkward twenties when he made his initial appearance along the Bowery. He came from Maryland, no one knew why and a youthful greenness would have got him laughed at, had it not been for a look in his eye which suggested that while he might be green he might be game.

Having little education and no trade Ellison met existence by hiring out as bar-keeper to Fat Flynn, who kept a grog shop of singular vileness at 34 Bond. Its beer glasses were vulgarly large, its frequenters of the rough-neck school. But it was either work in Flynn’s or carry a hod, and Ellison, who was not fanatically fond of hard labor, and preferred to seek his bread along lines of least resistance, instantly and instinctively resolved on the side of Flynn’s.

Gangland is much more given to boxing gloves than books, and the conversation at Flynn’s, as it drifted across the bar to Ellison – busy drawing beer – was more calculated to help his hands than help his head. Now and then, to be sure, there would come one who, like Slimmy, had acquired a stir education, that is, a knowledge of books such as may be picked up in prison; but for the most those whom Ellison met, in the frothy course of business, were not the ones to feed his higher nature or elevate his soul. It was a society where the strong man was the best man, and only fist-right prevailed.

Ellison was young, husky, with length of reach and plenty of hitting power, and, as the interests of Flynn demanded, he bowed to his environment and beat up many a man. There were those abroad in Bond Street whom he could not have conquered. But, commonly sober and possessed besides of inborn gifts as a matchmaker, he had no trouble in avoiding these. The folks whom he hooked up with were of the genus cinch, species pushover, and proceeding carefully he built up in time a standing for valor throughout all the broad regions lying between Fourteenth Street and City Hall Park.