The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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THE

MUCKER

Edgar Rice Burroughs

BALLANTINE BOOKS . NEW YORK

THE MUCKER: Originally published serially in
All-Story Cavalier Weekly. Copyright (c) 1914,
by The Frank A. Munsey Co.

THE RETURN OF THE MUCKER: Sequel to THE MUCKER.
Originally published serially in All-Story Weekly.
Copyright (c) 1916, by The Frank A. Munsey Co.

First Ballantine Edition: January, 1966

Manufactured in the United States of America

BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.
101 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003

CONTENTS

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.

He had had his boyish scraps with his fellows off and on
ever since he could remember; but his first real fight came
when he was twelve. He had had an altercation with an
erstwhile pal over the division of the returns from some
freight-car booty. The gang was all present, and as words
quickly gave place to blows, as they have a habit of doing
in certain sections of the West Side, the men and boys formed
a rough ring about the contestants.

The battle was a long one. The two were rolling about
in the dust of the alley quite as often as they were upon their
feet exchanging blows. There was nothing fair, nor decent,
nor scientific about their methods. They gouged and bit and
tore. They used knees and elbows and feet, and but for
the timely presence of a brickbat beneath his fingers at the
psychological moment Billy Byrne would have gone down to
humiliating defeat. As it was the other boy went down, and
for a week Billy remained hidden by one of the gang pending
the report from the hospital.

When word came that the patient would live, Billy felt an
immense load lifted from his shoulders, for he dreaded arrest
and experience with the law that he had learned from
childhood to deride and hate. Of course there was the loss
of prestige that would naturally have accrued to him could
he have been pointed out as the "guy that croaked Sheehan";
but there is always a fly in the ointment, and Billy only
sighed and came out of his temporary retirement.

That battle started Billy to thinking, and the result of that
mental activity was a determination to learn to handle his
mitts scientifically--people of the West Side do not have
hands; they are equipped by Nature with mitts and dukes.
A few have paws and flippers.

He had no opportunity to realize his new dream for several
years; but when he was about seventeen a neighbor's
son surprised his little world by suddenly developing from an
unknown teamster into a locally famous light-weight.

The young man never had been affiliated with the gang, as
his escutcheon was defiled with a record of steady employment.
So Billy had known nothing of the sparring lessons his
young neighbor had taken, or of the work he had done at
the down-town gymnasium of Larry Hilmore.

Now it happened that while the new light-weight was unknown
to the charmed circle of the gang, Billy knew him fairly
well by reason of the proximity of their respective parental
back yards, and so when the glamour of pugilistic success
haloed the young man Billy lost no time in basking in the
light of reflected glory.

He saw much of his new hero all the following winter.
He accompanied him to many mills, and on one glorious occasion
occupied a position in the coming 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, provided you confined your efforts to
those of your own district; but for a bunch of yaps from
south of Twelfth Street to attempt to pull off any such
coarse work in his bailiwick--why it was unthinkable.

A hero and rescuer of lesser experience than Billy Byrne
would have rushed melodramatically into the midst of the
fray, and in all probability have had his face pushed completely
through the back of his head, for the guys from
Twelfth Street were not of the rah-rah-boy type of hoodlum
--they were bad men, with an upper case B. So Billy crept
stealthily along in the shadows until he was quite close to
them, and behind them. On the way he had gathered up a
cute little granite paving block, than which there is nothing
in the world harder, not even a Twelfth Street skull. He was
quite close now to one of the men--he who was wielding
the officer's club to such excellent disadvantage to the officer
--and then he raised the paving block only to lower it
silently and suddenly upon the back of that unsuspecting head
--"and then there were two."

Before the man's companions realized what had happened
Billy had possessed himself of the fallen club and struck one
of them a blinding, staggering blow across the eyes. Then
number three pulled his gun and fired point-blank at Billy.
The bullet tore through the mucker's left shoulder. It would
have sent a more highly organized and nervously inclined
man to the pavement; but Billy was neither highly organized
nor nervously inclined, so that about the only immediate
effect it had upon him was to make him mad--before he
had been but peeved--peeved at the rank crust that had
permitted these cheap-skates from south of Twelfth Street
to work his territory.

Thoroughly aroused, Billy was a wonder. From a long
line of burly ancestors he had inherited the physique of a
prize bull. From earliest childhood he had fought, always
unfairly, so that he knew all the tricks of street fighting.
During the past year there had been added to Billy's natural
fighting ability and instinct a knowledge of the scientific end
of the sport. The result was something appalling--to the
gink from Twelfth Street.

Before he knew whether his shot had killed Billy his gun
had been wrenched from his hand and flung across the street;
he was down on the granite with a hand as hard as the paving
block scrambling his facial attractions beyond hope of
recall.

By this time Patrolman Lasky had staggered to his feet,
and most opportunely at that, for the man whom Billy had
dazed with the club was recovering. Lasky promptly put
him to sleep with the butt of the gun that he had been unable
to draw when first attacked, then he turned to assist Billy.
But it was not Billy who needed assistance--it was the
gentleman from Bohemia. With difficulty Lasky dragged
Billy from his prey.

"Leave enough of him for the inquest," pleaded Lasky.

When the wagon arrived Billy had disappeared, but
Lasky had recognized him and thereafter the two had nodded
pleasantly to each other upon such occasions as they chanced
to meet upon the street.

Two years elapsed before the event transpired which proved
a crisis in Billy's life. During this period his existence had
been much the same as before. He had collected what was
coming to him from careless and less muscular citizens. He
had helped to stick up a half-dozen saloons. He had robbed
the night men in two elevated stations, and for a while had
been upon the pay-roll of a certain union and done strong
arm work in all parts of the city for twenty-five dollars a
week.

By day he was a general utility man about Larry Hilmore's
boxing academy, and time and time again Hilmore
urged him to quit drinking and live straight, for he saw
in the young giant the makings of a great heavy-weight;
but Billy couldn't leave the booze alone, and so the best that
he got was an occasional five spot for appearing in preliminary
bouts with third- and fourth-rate heavies and has-beens; but
during the three years that he had hung about Hilmore's he had
acquired an enviable knowledge of the manly art of self-defense.

On the night that things really began to happen in the
life of Billy Byrne that estimable gentleman was lolling in
front of a saloon at the corner of Lake and Robey. The
dips that congregated nightly there under the protection of
the powerful politician who owned the place were commencing
to assemble. Billy knew them all, and nodded to them
as they passed him. He noted surprise in the faces of several
as they saw him standing there. He wondered what it
was all about, and determined to ask the next man who
evinced even mute wonderment at his presence what was
eating him.

Then Billy saw a harness bull strolling toward him from
the east. It was Lasky. When Lasky saw Billy he too opened
his eyes in surprise, and when he came quite close to the
mucker he whispered something to him, though he kept his
eyes straight ahead as though he had not seen, Billy at all.

In deference to the whispered request Billy presently
strolled around the corner toward Walnut Street, but at the
alley back of the saloon he turned suddenly in. A hundred
yards up the alley he found Lasky in the shadow of a telephone
pole.

"Wotinell are you doin' around here?" asked the patrolman.
"Didn't you know that Sheehan had peached?"

Two nights before old man Schneider, goaded to desperation
by the repeated raids upon his cash drawer, had shown
fight when he again had been invited to elevate his hands,
and the holdup men had shot him through the heart. Sheehan
had been arrested on suspicion.

Billy had not been with Sheehan that night. As a matter
of fact he never had trained with him, for, since the boyish
battle that the two had waged, there had always been ill
feeling between them; but with Lasky's words Billy knew
what had happened.

"Sheehan says I done it, eh?" he questioned.

"That's what he says."

"I wasn't within a mile of Schneider's that night," protested
Billy.

"The Lieut thinks different," said Lasky. "He'd be only
too glad to soak you; for you've always been too slick to
get nicked before. Orders is out to get you, and if I were
you I'd beat it and beat it quick. I don't have to tell you
why I'm handing you this, but it's all I can do for you.
Now take my advice and make yourself scarce, though
you'll have to go some to make your get-away now--every
man on the force has your description by this time."

Billy turned without a word and walked east in the alley
toward Lincoln Street. Lasky returned to Robey Street. In
Lincoln Street Billy walked north to Kinzie. Here he entered
the railroad yards. An hour later he was bumping out of
town toward the West on a fast freight. Three weeks later
he found himself in San Francisco. He had no money, but
the methods that had so often replenished his depleted
exchequer at home he felt would serve the same purpose here.

Being unfamiliar with San Francisco, Billy did not know
where best to work, but when by accident he stumbled upon
a street where there were many saloons whose patrons were
obviously seafaring men Billy was distinctly elated. What
could be better for his purpose than a drunken sailor?

He entered one of the saloons and stood watching a game
of cards, or thus he seemed to be occupied. As a matter
of fact his eyes were constantly upon the alert, roving, about
the room to wherever a man was in the act of paying for
a round of drinks that a fat wallet might be located.

Presently one that filled him with longing rewarded his
careful watch. The man was sitting at a table a short distance
from Billy. Two other men were with him. As he
paid the waiter from a well-filled pocketbook he looked up to
meet Billy's eyes upon him.

With a drunken smile he beckoned to the mucker to join
them. Billy felt that Fate was overkind to him, and he lost
no time in heeding her call. A moment later he was sitting
at the table with the three sailors, and had ordered a drop
of red-eye.

The stranger was very lavish in his entertainment. He
scarcely waited for Billy to drain one glass before he ordered
another, and once after Billy had left the table for a moment
he found a fresh drink awaiting him when he returned--his
host had already poured it for him.

It was this last drink that did the business.

CHAPTER II

SHANGHAIED

WHEN Billy opened his eyes again he could not recall, for
the instant, very much of his recent past. At last he remembered
with painful regret the drunken sailor it had been his
intention to roll. He felt deeply chagrined that his rightful
prey should have escaped him. He couldn't understand how
it had happened.

"This Frisco booze must be something fierce," thought
Billy.

His head ached frightfully and he was very sick. So sick
that the room in which he lay seemed to be rising and falling
in a horribly realistic manner. Every time it dropped it
brought Billy's stomach nearly to his mouth.

Billy shut his eyes. Still the awful sensation. Billy groaned.
He never had been so sick in all his life before, and, my, how
his poor head did hurt. Finding that it only seemed to make
matters worse when he closed his eyes Billy opened them
again.

He looked about the room in which he lay. He found it a
stuffy hole filled with bunks in tiers three deep around the
sides. In the center of the room was a table. Above the table a
lamp hung suspended from one of the wooden beams of the
ceiling.

The lamp arrested Billy's attention. It was swinging back
and forth rather violently. This could not be a hallucination.
The room might seem to be rising and falling, but that lamp
could not seem to be swinging around in any such manner if
it were not really and truly swinging. He couldn't account for
it. Again he shut his eyes for a moment. When he opened
them to look again at the lamp he found it still swung as
before.

Cautiously he slid from his bunk to the floor. It was with
difficulty that he kept his feet. Still that might be but the
effects of the liquor. At last he reached the table to which he
clung for support while he extended one hand toward the
lamp.

There was no longer any doubt! The lamp was beating
back and forth like the clapper of a great bell. Where was he?
Billy sought a window. He found some little round, glass-covered
holes near the low ceiling at one side of the room. It
was only at the greatest risk to life and limb that he managed
to crawl on all fours to one of them.

As he straightened up and glanced through he was appalled
at the sight that met his eyes. As far as he could see there was
naught but a tumbling waste of water. And then the truth of
what had happened to him broke upon his understanding.

"An' I was goin' to roll that guy!" he muttered in helpless
bewilderment. "I was a-goin' to roll him, and now look here
wot he has done to me!"

At that moment a light appeared above as the hatch was
raised, and Billy saw the feet and legs of a large man descending
the ladder from above. When the newcomer reached the
floor and turned to look about his eyes met Billy's, and Billy
saw that it was his host of the previous evening.

"Well, my hearty, how goes it?" asked the stranger.

"You pulled it off pretty slick," said Billy.

"What do you mean?" asked the other with a frown.

"Come off," said Billy; "you know what I mean."

"Look here," replied the other coldly. "Don't you forget
that I'm mate of this ship, an' that you want to speak
respectful to me if you ain't lookin' for trouble. My name's
MR. Ward, an' when you speak to me say SIR. Understand?"

Billy scratched his head, and blinked his eyes. He never
before had been spoken to in any such fashion--at least not
since he had put on the avoirdupois of manhood. His head
ached horribly and he was sick to his stomach--frightfully
sick. His mind was more upon his physical suffering than
upon what the mate was saying, so that quite a perceptible
interval of time elapsed before the true dimensions of the
affront to his dignity commenced to percolate into the befogged
and pain-racked convolutions of his brain.

The mate thought that his bluster had bluffed the new
hand. That was what he had come below to accomplish.
Experience had taught him that an early lesson in discipline
and subordination saved unpleasant encounters in the future.
He also had learned that there is no better time to put a bluff
of this nature across than when the victim is suffering from
the after-effects of whiskey and a drug--mentality, vitality,
and courage are then at their lowest ebb. A brave man often
is reduced to the pitiful condition of a yellow dog when
nausea sits astride his stomach.

But the mate was not acquainted with Billy Byrne of Kelly's
gang. Billy's brain was befuddled, so that it took some time
for an idea to wriggle its way through, but his courage was all
there, and all to the good. Billy was a mucker, a hoodlum, a
gangster, a thug, a tough. When he fought, his methods would
have brought a flush of shame to the face of His Satanic
Majesty. He had hit oftener from behind than from before. He
had always taken every advantage of size and weight and
numbers that he could call to his assistance. He was an
insulter of girls and women. He was a bar-room brawler, and
a saloon-corner loafer. He was all that was dirty, and mean,
and contemptible, and cowardly in the eyes of a brave man,
and yet, notwithstanding all this, Billy Byrne was no coward.
He was what he was because of training and environment. He
knew no other methods; no other code. Whatever the meager
ethics of his kind he would have lived up to them to the
death. He never had squealed on a pal, and he never had left
a wounded friend to fall into the hands of the enemy--the
police.

Nor had he ever let a man speak to him, as the mate had
spoken, and get away with it, and so, while he did not act as
quickly as would have been his wont had his brain been clear,
he did act; but the interval of time had led the mate into an
erroneous conception of its cause, and into a further rash
show of authority, and had thrown him off his guard as well.

"What you need," said the mate, advancing toward Billy,
"is a bash on the beezer. It'll help you remember that you
ain't nothin' but a dirty damn landlubber, an' when your
betters come around you'll--"

But what Billy would have done in the presence of his
betters remained stillborn in the mate's imagination in the
face of what Billy really did do to his better as that worthy
swung a sudden, vicious blow at the mucker's face.

Billy Byrne had not been scrapping with third- and fourth-
rate heavies, and sparring with real, live ones for nothing.
The mate's fist whistled through empty air; the blear-eyed
hunk of clay that had seemed such easy prey to him was
metamorphosed on the instant into an alert, catlike bundle
of steel sinews, and Billy Byrne swung that awful right with
the pile-driver weight, that even The Big Smoke himself had
acknowledged respect for, straight to the short ribs of his
antagonist.

With a screech of surprise and pain the mate crumpled in
the far corner of the forecastle, rammed halfway beneath a
bunk by the force of the terrific blow. Like a tiger Billy
Byrne was after him, and dragging the man out into the
center of the floor space he beat and mauled him until his
victim's blood-curdling shrieks echoed through the ship from
stem to stern.

When the captain, followed by a half-dozen seamen rushed
down the companionway, he found Billy sitting astride the
prostrate form of the mate. His great fingers circled the man's
throat, and with mighty blows he was dashing the fellow's
head against the hard floor. Another moment and murder
would have been complete.

"Avast there!" cried the captain, and as though to punctuate
his remark he swung the heavy stick he usually carried
full upon the back of Billy's head. It was that blow that
saved the mate's life, for when Billy came to he found himself
in a dark and smelly hole, chained and padlocked to a
heavy stanchion.

They kept Billy there for a week; but every day the
captain visited him in an attempt to show him the error of
his way. The medium used by the skipper for impressing
his ideas of discipline upon Billy was a large, hard stick.
At the end of the week it was necessary to carry Billy above
to keep the rats from devouring him, for the continued beatings
and starvation had reduced him to little more than an
unconscious mass of raw and bleeding meat.

"There," remarked the skipper, as he viewed his work by
the light of day, "I guess that fellow'll know his place next
time an officer an' a gentleman speaks to him."

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