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 in 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 something
wonderful. At the funeral services it was said that without a doubt
Skippy had gone to a better home. His account was squared.

* * * * *

Skippy's story is not invented to be told here. In its main facts it is
a plain account of a well-remembered drama of the slums, on which the
curtain was rung down in the Tombs yard. There are Skippies without
number growing up in those slums to-da