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 l