of bloody fights waged back and forth across these pavements, of young boys maimed, crippled, or blinded in these savage fights, of one boy who had his eye torn out of his head by his enemy’s gouging thumb in a fight to a finish on one of the piers, and of another whose brains had been smashed out on the pavement below the elevated structure by a rock hurled by an enemy’s hand in a fight of the neighbourhood gangs. Thus, in pier and alley, on street and roof, children had learned the arts of murder, the smell of blood, the odour of brains upon the pavement. Abe told how one of his older brothers, Barney—a thickly set, powerful-looking man with short thick hands and a tough meaty-looking fighter’s face, grey, square, and good-humoured—had to fight it out step by step with the gangsters, who had come to his shop, again and again, with demands for money—money which the merchants of the district paid them meekly and regularly for “protection”—a euphemism for graft and menace, a bribe for being left alone and for the assurance that one’s shop would not be entered and one’s stock smashed or stolen in the night. Barney had met all these menaces with a hard cold eye and two rock-like fists with which time and again he had beaten into a pulp the thugs who came to threaten him: he was a good man and a savage fighter and he had learned the arts of combat in the sternest and most brutal arena on earth—the city streets.
“And—oh-ho-ho-ho!”—softly, painfully, Abe lifted his widely grinning face and laughed, “how that guy loves it! Say! they picked the wrong one when they picked on him! Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho! Can he fight! Does he love it! Say! do you know what I saw him do to two of them one time—oh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! Gee! it was rich! They came in there to shake him down and—Oh! Ho-ho!—ho! You shoulda seen it! He picks up a keg of zinc that weighs 200 pounds and he breaks it—oh-ho-ho-ho!—over the first guy’s head.”
“And what became of the second guy?”
“Oh-ho-ho-ho!… Gee it was rich! You shoulda seen that other guy get out of there! Say! He almost tore the door down in his hurry—oh-ho-ho-ho!”
Such were the various members of this family as Eugene came to know about them: each of them in his own way was marked by a decisive individuality and independence of spirit which told of their lives of combat, toil and struggle in the city streets, and yet, although indelibly marked, scarred and hardened by his life, none of them had been
