Alma, round, dark, vivacious, eyes as deep and soft and black as velvet, was the unchallenged belle of her Williamsburg set. Days she worked as a dressmaker, without getting rich. Nights she went to rackets, which are dances wide open and unfenced. Sundays she took in picnics, or rode up and down on the trolleys – those touring cars of the poor.
Spanish met Alma and worshipped her, for so was the world made. Being thus in love, while before he, Spanish, had only needed money, now he had to have it. For love’s price to a man is money, just as its price to a woman is tears.
Casting about for ways and means, Spanish’s money-hunting eye fell upon Jigger. Jigger owned a stuss-house in Forsyth Street, between Hester and Grand. Jigger was prosperous beyond the dreams of avarice. Multitudes, stabbing stuss, thronged his temple of chance. As a quick, sure way to amass riches, Spanish decided to become Jigger’s partner. Between them they would divide the harvest of Forsyth Street stuss.
The golden beauty of the thought lit up the dark face of Spanish with a smile that was like a splash of vicious sunshine. Alma, in the effulgence of her toilets, should overpower all rivalry! At rout and racket, he, Spanish, would lead the hard walk with her, and she should shine out upon Gangland fashion like a fire in a forest.
His soul having wallowed itself weary in these visions, Spanish sought Jigger as a step towards making the visions real. Spanish and his proposition met with obstruction. Jigger couldn’t see it, wouldn’t have it.
Spanish was neither astonished nor dismayed. He had foreseen the Jiggerian reluctance, and was organized to break it down. When Jigger declined his proffered partnership – in which he, Jigger, must furnish the capital while Spanish contributed only his avarice – and asked, “Why should I?” he, Spanish, was ready with an answer.
“Why should you?” and Spanish repeated Jigger’s question so that his reply might have double force. “Because, if you don’t, I’ll bump youse off.” Gangland is so much like Missouri that you must always be prepared to show it. Gangland takes nothing on trust. And, if you try to run a bluff, it calls you. Spanish wore a low-browed, sullen, sour look. But he had killed no one, owned no dread repute, and Jigger was used to sullen, sour, lowbrowed looks. Thus, when Spanish spoke of bumping Jigger off, that courtier of fortune, full of a case-hardened scepticism, laughed low and long and mockingly. He told the death-threatening Spanish to come a-running.
Spanish didn’t come a-running, but he came much nearer it than Jigger liked. Crossing up with the perverse Jigger the next evening, at the corner of Forsyth and Grand, he opened upon that obstinate stuss dealer with a Colt’s-38. Jigger managed to escape, but little Sadie Rotin, otat eight, was killed. Jigger, who was unarmed, could not return the fire. Spanish, confused and flurried, doubtless, by the poor result of his gun-play, betook himself to flight.
The police did not get Spanish; but in Gangland the incident did him little good. At the Ajax Club, and in other places where the best blood of the gangs was wont to unbuckle and give opinions, such sentiment-makers as the Dropper, Ike the Blood, Kid Kleiney, Little Beno, Fritzie Rice, Kid Strauss, the Humble Dutchman, Zamo, and the Irish Wop, held but one view. Such slovenly work was without precedent as without apology. To miss Jigger aroused ridicule. But to go farther, and kill a child playing in the street, spelled bald disgrace. Thereafter no self-respecting lady would drink with Spanish, no gentleman of gang position would return his nod. He would be given the frozen face at the rackets, the icy eye in the streets.
To be sure, his few friends, contending feebly, insisted that it wasn’t Spanish who had killed the little Rotin girl. When Spanish cracked off his rod at Jigger, others had caught the spirit. A half dozen guns – they said – had been set blazing; and it was some unknown practitioner who had shot down the little Rotin girl. What were the heart-feelings of father and mother Rotin, to see their baby killed, did not appeal as a question to either the friends or foes of Spanish. Gangland is interested only in dollars or war.
That contention of his friends did not restore Spanish in the general estimation. All must confess that at least he had missed Jigger. And Jigger without a rod! It crowded hard upon the unbelievable, and could be accounted for only upon the assumption that Spanish was rattled, which is worse than being scared. Mere fear might mean no more than an excess of prudence. To get rattled, everywhere and under all conditions, is the mean sure mark of weakness.
While discussion, like a pendulum, went swinging to and fro, Spanish – possibly a-smart from what biting things were being said in his disfavor – came to town, and grievously albeit casually shot an unknown. Following which feat he again disappeared. None knew where he had gone. His whereabouts was as much a mystery as the identity of the unknown whom he had shot, or the reason he had shot him. These two latter questions are still borne as puzzles upon the ridge of gang conjecture.
That this time he had hit his man, however, lifted Spanish somewhat from out those lower reputational depths into which missing Jigger had cast him. The unknown, to be sure, did not die; the hospital books showed that. But he had stopped a bullet. Which last proved that Spanish wasn’t always rattled when he pulled a gun. The incident, all things considered, became a trellis upon which the reputation of Spanish, before so prone and hopeless, began a little to climb.
The strenuous life doesn’t always blossom and bear good fruit. Balked in his intended partnership with Jigger, and subsequently missing Jigger – to say nothing of the business of the little Rotin girl, dead and down under the grass roots – Spanish not only failed to Get the Money! but succeeded in driving himself out of town. Many and vain were the gang guesses concerning him. Some said he was in Detroit, giving professional aid to a gifted booster. The latter was of the feminine gender, and, aside from her admitted genius for shoplifting, was acclaimed the quickest hand with a hanger – by which you are to understand that outside pendant purse wherewith women equip themselves as they go forth to shop – of all the gon-molls between the two oceans. Others insisted that Spanish was in Baltimore, and had joined out with a mob of poke-getters. The great, the disastrous thing, however – and to this all Gangland agreed – was that he had so bungled his destinies as to put himself out of New York.
“Detroit! Baltimore!” exclaimed the Dropper. “W’y, it’s woise’n bein’ in stir! A guy might as well be doin’ time as live in them burgs!”
The Dropper, in his iron-fisted way, was sincere in what he said. Later, he himself was given eighteen spaces in Sing Sing, which exile he might have missed had he fled New York in time. But he couldn’t, and didn’t. And so the Central Office got him, the District Attorney prosecuted him, the jury convicted him, and the judge sentenced him to that long captivity. Living in New York is not a preference, but an appetite – like drinking whiskey – and the Dropper had acquired the habit.
What was the Dropper settled for?
Robbery.
It’s too long to tell here, however, besides being another story. Some other day I may give it to you.
Spanish, having abandoned New York, could no longer bear Alma loving company at picnic, rout and racket. What was Alma to do? She lived for routs, reveled in rackets, joyed in picnics. Must these delights be swept away? She couldn’t go alone – it was too expensive. Besides, it would evince a lack of class.
Alma, as proud and as wedded to her social position as any silken member of the Purple and Fine Linen Gang that ever rolled down Fifth Avenue in her brougham, revolved these matters upon her wheel of thought. Also, she came to conclusions. She, an admitted belle, could not consent to social obliteration. Spanish had fled; she worshipped his black eyes, his high courage; she would keep a heart-corner vacant for him in case he came back. Pending his return, however, she would go into society; and, for those reasons of expense and class and form, she would not go alone.
Alma submitted her position to a beribboned jury of her peers. Their judgment ran abreast of her own.
“A goil would be a mutt,” they said, “to stay cocked up at home. An’ yet a goil couldn’t go chasin’ around be her lonesome. Alma” – this was their final word – “you must cop off another steady.”
“But what would Johnny say?” asked Alma; for she couldn’t keep her thoughts off Spanish, of whom she stood a little bit in fear.
“Johnny’s