tory. Skippy and his associates were
long since in the Rogues' Gallery, numbered and indexed as truly a
bad lot now. They were no longer boys, but toughs. Most of them had
"done time" up the river and come back more hardened than they went,
full of new tricks always, which they were eager to show the boys, to
prove that they had not been idle while they were away. On the police
returns they figured as "speculators," a term that sounded better than
thief, and meant, as they understood it, much the same; viz. a man who
made a living out of other people's labor. It was conceded in the
slums, everywhere, that the Scrabble Alley gang was a little the
boldest that had for a long time defied the police. It had the call on
the other gangs in all the blocks around, for it had the biggest
fighters as well as the cleverest thieves of them all.

Then one holiday morning, when in a hundred churches the paean went up,
"On earth peace, good-will toward men," all New York rang with the
story of a midnight murder committed by Skippy's gang. The
saloon-keeper whose place they were sacking to get the "stuff" for
keeping Christmas in their way had come upon them, and Skippy had shot
him down while the others ran. A universal shout for vengeance went up
from outraged Society.

It sounded the death-knell of the gang. It was scattered to the four
winds, all except Skippy, who was tried for murder and hanged. The
papers spoke of his phenomenal calmness under the gallows; said it was
defiance. The priest who had been with him in his last hours said he
was content to go to a better home. They were all wrong. Had the
pictures that chased each other across Skippy's mind as the black cap
was pulled over his face been visible to their eyes, they would have
seen Scrabble Alley with its dripping hydrant, and the puddle in which
the children splashed with dirty, bare feet; the dark basement room
with its mouldy wall; the notice in the yard, "No ball-playing allowed
here"; the policeman who stamped him as one of a bad lot, and the
sullen man who thought it had been better for him, the time he was run
over, if he had died. Skippy asked himself moodily if he was right
after all, and if boys were ever to have any show. He died with the
question unanswered.

They said that no such funeral ever went out of Scrabble Alley before.
There was a real raid on the undertaker's where Skippy lay in state
two whole days, and the wake was talked of for many a day as