ough
he let them off they had been branded, Skippy and the rest, as a bad
lot.

That was the starting-point in Skippy's career. With the brand upon him
he accepted the future it marked out for him, reasoning as little, or as
vaguely, about the justice of it as he had about the home conditions of
the alley. The world, what he had seen of it, had taught him one lesson:
to take things as he found them, because that was the way they were; and
that being the easiest, and, on the whole, best suited to Skippy's
general make-up, he fell naturally into the _role_ assigned him. After
that he worked the growler on his own hook most of the time. The "gang"
he had joined found means of keeping it going that more than justified
the brand the policeman had put upon it. It was seldom by honest work.
What was the use? The world owed them a living, and it was their
business to collect it as easily as they could. It was everybody's
business to do that, as far as they could see, from the man who owned
the alley, down.

They made the alley pan out in their own way. It had advantages the
builder hadn't thought of, though he provided them. Full of secret ins
and outs, runways and passages, not easily found, to the surrounding
tenements, it offered chances to get away when one or more of the gang
were "wanted" for robbing this store on the avenue, tapping that till,
or raiding the grocer's stock, that were A No. 1. When some tipsy man
had been waylaid and "stood up," it was an unequalled spot for dividing
the plunder. It happened once or twice, as time went by, that a man was
knocked on the head and robbed within the bailiwick of the now notorious
Scrabble Alley gang, or that a drowned man floated ashore in the dock
with his pockets turned inside out. On such occasions the police made
an extra raid, and more or less of the gang were scooped in, but nothing
ever came of it. Dead men tell no tales, and they were not more silent
than the Scrabbles, if, indeed, these had anything to tell.

It came gradually to be an old story. 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