was coming back to
SHOW THEM. He had left under a cloud and with a reputation for genuine
toughness and rowdyism that has seen few parallels even in the ungentle
district of his birth and upbringing.

A girl had changed him. She was as far removed from Billy's sphere as
the stars themselves; but Billy had loved her and learned from her, and
in trying to become more as he knew the men of her class were he had
sloughed off much of the uncouthness that had always been a part of him,
and all of the rowdyism. Billy Byrne was no longer the mucker.

He had given her up because he imagined the gulf between Grand Avenue
and Riverside Drive to be unbridgeable; but he still clung to the ideals
she had awakened in him. He still sought to be all that she might wish
him to be, even though he realized that he never should see her again.

Grand Avenue would be the easiest place to forget his sorrow--her he
could never forget. And then, his newly awakened pride urged him back to
the haunts of his former life that he might, as he would put it himself,
show them. He wanted the gang to see that he, Billy Byrne, wasn't afraid
to be decent. He wanted some of the neighbors to realize that he could
work steadily and earn an honest living, and he looked forward with
delight to the pleasure and satisfaction of rubbing it in to some of the
saloon keepers and bartenders who had helped keep him drunk some five
days out of seven, for Billy didn't drink any more.

But most of all he wanted to vindicate himself in the eyes of the
once-hated law. He wanted to clear his record of the unjust charge of
murder which had sent him scurrying out of Chicago over a year before,
that night that Patrolman Stanley Lasky of the Lake Street Station had
tipped him off that Sheehan had implicated him in the murder of old man
Schneider.

Now Billy Byrne had not killed Schneider. He had been nowhere near the
old fellow's saloon at the time of the holdup; but Sheehan, who had been
arrested and charged with the crime, was an old enemy of Billy's, and
Sheehan had seen a chance to divert some of the suspicion from himself
and square accounts with Byrne at the same time.

The new Billy Byrne was ready to accept at face value everything which
seemed to belong in any way to the environment of that exalted realm
where dwelt the girl he loved. Law, order, and justice appeared to Billy
in a new light since he had rubbed elbows with the cultured and refined.

He no longer