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champion's corner. When the prize fighter toured, Billy continued to hang around

Hilmore's place, running errands and doing odd jobs, the while he picked up

pugilistic lore, and absorbed the spirit of the game along with the rudiments and

finer points of its science, almost unconsciously. Then his ambition changed.

Once he had longed to shine as a gunman; now he was determined to become a

prize fighter; but the old gang still saw much of him, and he was a familiar figure

about the saloon corners along Grand Avenue and Lake Street.

During this period Billy neglected the box cars on Kinzie Street, partially because

he felt that he was fitted for more dignified employment, and as well for the fact

that the railroad company had doubled the number of watchmen in the yards;

but there were times when he felt the old yearning for excitement and adventure.

These times were usually coincident with an acute financial depression in Billy's

change pocket, and then he would fare forth in the still watches of the night, with

a couple of boon companions and roll a souse, or stick up a saloon.

It was upon an occasion of this nature that an event occurred which was fated

later to change the entire course of Billy Byrne's life. Upon the West Side the

older gangs are jealous of the sanctity of their own territory. Outsiders do not

trespass with impunity. From Halsted to Robey, and from Lake to Grand lay the

broad hunting preserve of Kelly's gang, to which Billy had been almost born, one

might say. Kelly owned the feed-store back of which the gang had loafed for years,

and though himself a respectable businessman his name had been attached to

the pack of hoodlums who held forth at his back door as the easiest means of

locating and identifying its motley members.

The police and citizenry of this great territory were the natural enemies and prey

of Kelly's gang, but as the kings of old protected the deer of their great forests

from poachers, so Kelly's gang felt it incumbent upon them to safeguard the lives

and property which they considered theirs by divine right. It is doubtful that they

thought of the matter in just this way, but the effect was the same.

And so it was that as Billy Byrne wended homeward alone in the wee hours of the

morning after emptying the cash drawer of old Schneider's saloon and locking the

weeping Schneider in his own ice box, he was deeply grieved and angered to see

three rank outsiders from Twelfth Street beating Patrolman Stanley Lasky with

his own baton, the while they simultaneously strove to kick in his ribs with their

heavy boots.

Now Lasky was no friend of Billy Byrne; but the officer had been born and raised

in the district and was attached to the Twenty-eighth Precinct Station on Lake

Street near Ashland Avenue, and so was part and parcel of the natural

possession of the gang. Billy felt that it was entirely ethical to beat up a cop,

The Mucker