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PART I.

CHAPTER I. BILLY BYRNE

BILLY BYRNE was a product of the streets and alleys of Chicago's great West

Side. From Halsted to Robey, and from Grand Avenue to Lake Street there was

scarce a bartender whom Billy knew not by his first name. And, in proportion to

their number which was considerably less, he knew the patrolmen and plain

clothes men equally as well, but not so pleasantly.

His kindergarten education had commenced in an alley back of a feed-store. Here

a gang of older boys and men were wont to congregate at such times as they had

naught else to occupy their time, and as the bridewell was the only place in which

they ever held a job for more than a day or two, they had considerable time to

devote to congregating.

They were pickpockets and second-story men, made and in the making, and all

were muckers, ready to insult the first woman who passed, or pick a quarrel with

any stranger who did not appear too burly. By night they plied their real

vocations. By day they sat in the alley behind the feedstore and drank beer from a

battered tin pail.

The question of labor involved in transporting the pail, empty, to the saloon

across the street, and returning it, full, to the alley back of the feed-store was

solved by the presence of admiring and envious little boys of the neighborhood

who hung, wide-eyed and thrilled, about these heroes of their childish lives.

Billy Byrne, at six, was rushing the can for this noble band, and incidentally

picking up his knowledge of life and the rudiments of his education. He gloried in

the fact that he was personally acquainted with "Eddie" Welch, and that with his

own ears he had heard "Eddie" tell the gang how he stuck up a guy on West Lake

Street within fifty yards of the Twenty-eighth Precinct Police Station.

The kindergarten period lasted until Billy was ten; then he commenced "swiping"

brass faucets from vacant buildings and selling them to a fence who ran a

junkshop on Lincoln Street near Kinzie.

From this man he obtained the hint that graduated him to a higher grade, so that

at twelve he was robbing freight cars in the yards along Kinzie Street, and it was

about this same time that he commenced to find pleasure in the feel of his fist

against the jaw of a fellow-man.

The Mucker