worked the Broadway rattlers in his own improper person, but – paying a compliment to his genius for organization – that he had drawn about himself a group of children and taught them to steal for his sinful use. It is no more than truth to say, however, that never in New York City was Spanish convicted as either a Fagin or a pickpocket, and the police – as he charges – may have given him these titles as a cover for their ignorance, which some insist is of as deep an indigo as the hue of their own coats.
Spanish was about seventeen when he began making an East Side stir. He did not yearn to be respectable. He had borne witness to the hard working respectability of his father and mother, and remembered nothing as having come from it more than aching muscles and empty pockets. Their clothes were poor, their house was poor, their table poor. Why should he fret himself with ideals of the respectable?
Work?
It didn’t pay.
In his blood, too, flowed malignant cross-currents, which swept him towards idleness and all manner of violences.
Nor did the lesson of the hour train him in selfrestraint. All over New York City, in Fifth Avenue, at the Five Points, the single cry was, Get the Money! The rich were never called upon to explain their prosperity. The poor were forever being asked to give some legal reason for their poverty. Two men in a magistrate’s court are fined ten dollars each. One pays, and walks free; the other doesn’t, and goes to the Island. Spanish sees, and hears, and understands.
“Ah!” cries he, “that boob went to the Island not for what he did but for not having ten bones!”
And the lesson of that thunderous murmur – reaching from the Battery to Kingsbridge – of Get the Money! rushes upon him; and he makes up his mind to heed it. Also, there are uncounted scores like Spanish, and other uncounted scores with better coats than his, who are hearing and seeing and reasoning the same way.
Spanish stood but five feet three, and his place was among the lightweights. Such as the Dropper, who tilted the scales at 180, and whose name of Dropper had been conferred upon him because every time he hit a man he dropped him – such as Ike the Blood, as hard and heavy as the Dropper and whose title of the Blood had not been granted in any spirit of factitiousness – laughed at him. What matter that his heart was high, his courage proof? Physically, he could do nothing with these dangerous ones – as big as dangerous! And so, ferociously ready to even things up, he began packing a rod.
While Spanish, proceeding as best he might by his dim standards, was struggling for gang eminence and dollars, 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
