INGS OF GREAT JOY.
While Randall Clayton was lingering moodily over a lonely dinner
at the Grand Union, his office boy was dallying with a cigarette
on the front platform of a Fourth Avenue car.
Emil Einstein had safely sized up the friendly adieu of the two
room-mates, and was now hastening down to report his successful
infamy.
"Too late for Sixth Avenue!" the hard-faced boy muttered. "Catch
him at 'the Bavaria,' sure."
The round, gloating eyes of the young New York-nurtured Jew were
ablaze with a fierce thirst for pleasure.
Round shouldered, strongly built, his Semitic countenance was all
aglow with a superabundant vitality, and the pleasure-loving mouth
alone belied the keen intelligence of the wide set Hebraic eyes.
An eleve of the gutters of New York's East-Side ghetto, dangerously
half educated at the free public schools, Einstein, now nearing
seventeen, joined the dashing villainy of the Bowery tough to the
crafty long-headed scheming of the low-grade Israelite.
He had drank in all the precocious wiles of the Manhattan urchins
quickly after his sturdy Odalisque mother had dragged him, a
squalling urchin, out of the steerage confines of a cheap Hamburg
steamer.
A reckless, resolute, conscienceless sinner was the handsome Leah
Einstein; already, when, on the voyage, she fell under the influence
of a man who found his ready tool in this greasy but symmetrical
Esther, clad in her Polish rags.
When the decamping Viennese pharmacist had wearied of his low-life
Venus, their joint operations soon made the East Side too hot for
the man who boldly dared all, and who now yearned for a share of
the fleecing of the fatuous New Yorkers.
The Austrian criminal fugitive, after some years of varied adventure,
had circled back to New York City at last, and rejoiced to find in
Leah's son, now a burly youth, a fit companion and second for his
own craftily laid villanies. It was a capital for him, the legacy
of her nurture and his own training.
Mr. Fritz Braun's broad white brow was gathered in an impatient
frown as he strode out of Magdal's Pharmacy on Sixth Avenue and
paced with dignity past all the minor notables of the street.
Hulking policemen, loquacious barber, marketman and newsdealer,
small shop-keeper, and the saloon magnates, all knew the stolid
reticent German who presided over the veiled mysteries of Magdal's.
The whole region of Sixth Avenue, between Twenty-third and Thirtieth,
had its fl
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