It is possible that some of the bridegroom's kinspeople, coming down from the North for the wedding, were shocked to find a wizen, coal-black woman, who was lame of one leg, not only taking part in the ceremony, filling a place next in importance to that of the contracting pair and the maid of honour, but apparently in active and undisputed charge of the princ.i.p.al details. However, being well-bred persons, they did not betray their astonishment by word, look or deed. Perhaps they figured it as one of the customs of the country that an old shrill-voiced negress, smelling of snuff and black silk, should play so prominent a role in the event itself and in the reception that followed.

However, all that is ancient history now. What I have to add is a commingling of past local history and present local history. As I said at the outset, there were formerly any number of black children in our town who bore the names of white friends and white patrons, but to my knowledge there was never but one white child named for a black person.

The child thus distinguished was a girl child, the first-born of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Winslow. Her full name was Charlotte Helm Winslow, but nearly everybody called her Little Sharley. She is still called so, I believe, though growing now into quite a sizable young person.

CHAPTER VI

JOHN J. COINCIDENCE

Somebody said once that facts are stubborn things, which is a lie. Facts are almost the most flexible things known to man. The historian appreciates the truth of this just as the fictionist recognises and is governed by the opposite of it, each according to his lights. In recording the actual, the authentic, the definite, your chronicler may set down in all soberness things which are utterly inconceivable; may set them down because they have happened. But he who deals with the fanciful must be infinitely more conventional in his treatment of the probabilities and the possibilities, else the critics will say he has let his imagination run away with him. They'll tell him to put ice on his brow and advise sending his creative faculty to the restcure.

Jules Verne was a teller of most mad tales which he conjured up out of his head. The Brothers Wright and Edison and Holland, the submarine man, worked out their notions with monkey wrenches and screw drivers and things, thereby accomplishing verities far surpa.s.sing the limit where common sense threw up a barrier across the pathway of Verne's genius. H.

G. Wells never dreamed a dream of a world war to equal the one which William Hohenzollern loosed by ordering a flunky in uniform to transmit certain dispatches back yonder in the last week of July and the first week of August, 1914.

So always it has gone. So always, beyond peradventure, it must continue to go.

If in his first act the playwright has his princ.i.p.al characters a.s.sembled in a hotel lobby in Chicago and in Act II has them all b.u.mping into one another--quite by chance--in a dugout in Flanders, the reviewers sternly will chide him for violating Rule 1 of the book of dramatic plausibilities, and quite right they will be too. But when the identical event comes to pa.s.s in real life--as before now it has--we merely say that, after all, it's a small world now, isn't it? And so saying, pa.s.s along to the next preposterous occurrence that has just occurred. In fiction coincidence has its metes and bounds beyond which it dare not step. In human affairs it has none.

Speaking of coincidences, that brings me round to the matter of a certain sergeant and a certain private in our American Expeditionary Force which is a case that is a case in point of what I have just been saying upon this subject. If Old Man Coincidence had not b.u.t.ted into the picture when he did and where he did and so frequently as he did, there would be--for me--no tale to tell touching on these two, the sergeant and the private. But he did. And I shall.

To begin at the remote beginning, there once upon a time was a fight in front of the public school in Henry Street over on the East Side, in which encounter one Pasquale Gallino licked the Semitic stuffings out of a fellow-pupil of his--by name Hyman Ginsburg. To be explicit about it, he made the Ginsburg boy's somewhat prominent nose to bleed extensively and swelled up Hyman's ear until for days thereafter Hyman's head, viewed fore or aft, had rather a lop-sided appearance, what with one ear being so much thicker than its mate. The object of this mishandlement was as good as whipped before he started by reason of the longer reach and quicker fist play of his squat and swarthy opponent. Nevertheless, facing inevitable and painful defeat, he acquitted himself with proper credit and courage.

Bearing his honourable wounds, Master Ginsburg went home from battle to a tenement in Allen Street, there to be licked again for having been licked before; or, speaking with exact.i.tude, for having been in a fight, his father being one who held by the theory that diplomacy ever should find the way out to peace when blows threatened to follow on disputation. With view, therefore, to proving his profound distaste for physical violence in any form he employed it freely upon the body of his son, using to that end a strap. Scarred in new places, the victim of two beatings in one day went weeping and supperless to bed.

Now this fight in Henry Street took place some sixteen years ago, and in sixteen years a great deal of water runs under the bridges provided for that purpose and for other purposes. Two separate currents of the water that flowed caught up Hyman Ginsburg and Pasquale Gallino and carried them along differing channels toward differing destinies. While Hyman was in the grammar grades, a brag pupil, Pasquale was in the Protectory, a branded incorrigible. While Hyman was attending high school, Pasquale was attending reform school. When Hyman, a man grown, was taking his examinations with the idea of getting on the police force, Pasquale was constructing an alibi with the idea of staying out of Sing Sing. One achieved his present ambition--that was Hyman.

The next period of their respective developments found this pair in a fair way each to achieve a definite niche in his chosen profession.

Patrolman Hyman Ginsburg, after walking post for some months, had been taken out of uniform and put into civilian garb as a plain-clothes man on the Headquarters staff. Here he was making good. Having intelligence and energy and the racial persistence which is as much a part of his breed as their hands and their feet are, he was looked upon in the department as a detective with a future ahead of him.

As for him who had once been Pasquale Gallino, he now occupied a position of prominence amid congenial surroundings while following after equally congenial pursuits. There was a gang. Despite the fact that it was such a new gang, this gang before the eyes of law and order stood high upon a pinnacle of evil eminence, overtopping such old-established gangs as the Gas House and the Gophers, the Skinned Rabbits and the Pearl b.u.t.ton Kid's. Taking t.i.tle from the current name of its chieftain, it was popularly known as the Stretchy Gorman gang. Its headquarters was a boozing den of exceeding ill repute on the lower West Side. Its chief specialties were loft robberies and dock robberies. Its favourite side lines were election frauds and so-called strike-breaking jobs. The main amus.e.m.e.nt of its members was hoodlumism in its broader and more general phases. Its shield and its buckler was political influence of a sort; its keenest sword was its audacious young captain. You might call it a general-purposes gang. Contemporary gangsters spoke of it with respect and admiration. For a thing so young it gave great promise.

A day came, though, when the protection under which the Stretchy Gormans had flourished ceased to protect. It is not known, nor yet is it written, what the reason for this was. Perhaps there was a breaking off of the friendly relations theretofore existing between one of the down-town district leaders and one of the powers--name deleted--higher up. Perhaps the newspapers had scolded too shrilly, demanding the house-cleaning of a neighbourhood which had become a bad smell in the sensitive nostrils of honest taxpayers and valued advertisers. Certainly burglaries in the wholesale silk district had occurred so numerously as to const.i.tute a public scandal.

Then, besides, there was the incident of the night watchman of a North River freight pier, a worthy enough person though a nonvoter and therefore of small account from the viewpoint of ward politics, who stood up in single-handed defence of his employer's premises and goods against odds of at least four to one. Swinging a cold chisel, someone chipped a bit of bone out of the watchman's skull as expeditiously and almost as neatly as a visiting Englishman chips the poll of his breakfast egg; so that forever after the victim nursed an achesome and slightly addled brain. Then there were other things.

Be the cause what it may, it certainly is the fact that on a pleasant autumnal afternoon Inspector Krogan summoned to his presence two members of the Central Office staff and told them to go get Stretchy Gorman.

Stretchy was to be gone after and got on the blanket charge--the rubber blanket charge, as one might say, since it is so elastic and covers such a mult.i.tude of sins--of being a suspicious character.

Now Stretchy Gorman had no character to speak of; so therein the accusation appeared faulty. But equally was it true as Holy Gospel that he was suspicious of nearly everybody on earth and that nearly everybody on earth had reasons to be suspicious of him. So, balancing one word against the other, the garment might be said to fit him. At any rate, it was plain the supreme potentates had decreed for him that he was to wear it.

One of the detectives detailed to this a.s.signment was Hyman Ginsburg.

His partner on the job was a somewhat older man named Casane. These two frequently worked together. Pulling in double harness they made a dependable team. Both had wit and shrewdness. By sight, Casane knew the individual they were deputed to take; Ginsburg, to his knowledge, had never seen him.

Across his roll-top desk the inspector, speaking as follows, according to the mode of the fellowcraft, gave them their instructions:

"You'll likely be findin' this here party at the Stuffed Owl. That's his regular hang-out. My information is that he's usually there regular this time of the day. I've just had word that he went in there fifteen minutes ago; it's likely he'll be stayin' a while.

"Now, if he's in there don't you two go and send for him to come outside to you; nothin' like that. See? You go right in after him and nail him right in front of his own pals. Understand? I want him and his bunch and the reporters all to know that this here alleged drag of his that the newspapers've been beefin' so loud about is all bogus. And then you fetch him here to me and I'll do the rest. Don't make no gun play nor nothin' of that nature without you have to, but at the same time and nevertheless don't take no foolish chances. This party may act up rough and then again he may not. Get me? My guess is he won't. Still and notwithstandin', don't leave no openin's. Now get goin'."

Sure enough it was at the sign of the Stuffed Owl, down in a bas.e.m.e.nt bat cave of a place and in the dusk of the evening, that they found their man. To Ginsburg's curious eyes he revealed himself as a short, swart person with enormously broad shoulders and with a chimpanzee's arm reach. Look at those arms of his and one knew why he was called Stretchy. How he had acquired his last name of Gorman was only to be guessed at. It was fair to a.s.sume, though, he had got it by processes of self-adoption--no unusual thing in a city where overnight a Finkelstein turns into a Fogarty and he who at the going down of the sun was Antonio Baccigaluppi has at the upcoming of the same become Joseph Brown. One thing, though, was sure as rain: This particular Gorman had never been a Gorman born.

Not the blackest of the "Black Irish," not the most brunette of brunette Welshmen ever had a skin of that peculiar brownish pallor, like clear water in a cypress swamp, or eyes like the slitted pair looking out obliquely from this man's head.

Taking their cue of action from their superior's words, Casane and Ginsburg, having come down the short flight of steps leading from the sidewalk, went directly across the barroom to where their man sat at a small table with two others, presumably both of his following, for his companions.

The manner of the intruders was casual enough; casual and yet marked by a businesslike air. They knew that at this moment they were not especially attractive risks for an accident insurance company. The very sawdust on the floor stank of villainy; the bra.s.s bar rail might have been a rigid length of poison snake; the spittoons were small sinks of corruption. Moreover, they had been commissioned to take a monarch off his throne before the eyes of his courtiers, and history records that this ever was a proceeding fraught with peril.

Still they went straight toward him. Before they spoke a word--almost before they were well inside the street door--he must have recognised them as Headquarters men. Being what he was, he instantly would have appraised them for what they were had the meeting taken place in the dead vast and middle of Sahara's sandy wastes. Even the seasoned urbanite who is law-abiding and who has no cause to fear the thief-taker can pick out a detective halfway up the block.

Besides, in the same instant that they descended from the street level, the barkeeper with his tongue had made a small clucking sound, thrice repeated, and with all four fingers of his right hand had gripped the left lapel of his unb.u.t.toned waistcoat. Thereat there had been a general raising of heads all over the place. Since the days of Jonathan Wild and even before that--since the days when the Romany Rye came out of the East into England--the signal of the collar has been the sign of the collar, which means the cop.

The man they sought eyed them contemptuously from under the down-tilted visor of his cap as they approached him. His arms were folded upon the table top and for the moment he kept them so.

"Evening," said Casane civilly, pausing alongside him. "Call yourself Gorman, don't you?"

"I've been known to answer to that name," he answered back in the curious flat tone that is affected by some of his sort and is natural with the rest of them. "Wot of it?"

"There's somebody wants to have a talk with you up at the front office--that's all," said Casane.

"It's a pinch, then, huh?" The gangster put his open hands against the edge of the table as though for a rearward spring.

"I'm tellin' you all we know ourselves?" countered Casane. His voice was conciliatory--soothing almost. But Ginsburg had edged round past Casane, ready at the next warning move to take the gang leader on the flank with a quick forward rush, and inside their overcoats, the shapes of both the officers had tensed.

"Call it a pinch if you want to," went on Casane. "I'd call it more of an invitation just to take a little walk with us two and then have a chat with somebody else. Unless you or some of your friends here feel like startin' something there'll be no rough stuff--that's orders. We're askin' you to go along--first. How about it?"

"Oh, I'll go--I'll go! There's n.o.body got anything on me. And n.o.body's goin' to get anything on me neither."

He stood up and with a quick movement jerked back the skirts of his coat, holding them aloft so that his hip pockets and his waistband, showed.

"Take notice!" he cried, invoking as witnesses all present. "Take notice that I'm carryin' no gat! So don't you bulls try framin' me under the Sullivan Law for havin' a gat on me. There's half a dozen here knows I ain't heeled and kin swear to it--case of a frame-up. Now go ahead and frisk me!"

"That'll be all right--we could easy take your word for it," said Casane, still maintaining his placating pose. Nevertheless he signed to Ginsburg and the latter moved a step nearer their man and his practiced fingers ran swiftly over the unresisting form, feeling beneath the arms, down the flanks, about the belt line and even at the back of the neck for a suspicious hard bulge inside the garments, finally giving the side coat pockets a perfunctory slap.

"Unless you make it necessary, we won't be callin' for the wagon,"

Casane stated. "Just the three of us'll take a little stroll, like I'm telling you--just stroll out and take the air up to Headquarters."

He slipped into position on one side of the gangster, Ginsburg on the other. Over his shoulder the man thus placed between them looked round to where his two underlings still sat at the table, both silent as the rest of the company were, but both plainly prepared for any contingencies; both ready to follow their chief's lead in whatsoever course, peaceable or violent, he might next elect to follow.

"Here you, Louie," he bade one of them, "jump to the telephone and notify a certain party to have me mouthpiece at Headquarters by the time I kin get there with these two d.i.c.ks. Tell him the cops've got nothin'

on me, but I wants me mouthpiece there just the same--case of a tie."

Until now the preliminaries had been carried on with a due regard for the unwritten but rigid code of underworld etiquette. From neither side had there issued a single unethical word. The detectives had been punctilious to avoid ruffling the sensibilities of any and all. All the same, the prisoner chose of a sudden to turn nasty. It was at once manifest that he aimed to give offence without giving provocation or real excuse for reprisals on the part of the invaders. He spat sidewise across Casane's front and as he took the first step forward he brought the foot down upon one of Ginsburg's feet, grinding his heel sharply into the toes beneath. Ginsburg winced at the pain but did not speak; he had not spoken at all up until now, leaving it to Casane as the elder man to conduct the preliminaries.

"Why don't you say something, you Jew!" taunted the prisoner. "Don't you even know enough to excuse yourself when you stick your fat feet in people's way?"