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 Button Kid's. Taking title 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
amusement 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 constitute 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