Chapter: A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum
Alley.  He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row who
were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him.

His infantile countenance was livid with fury.  His small body was
writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths.

"Run, Jimmie, run!  Dey'll get yehs," screamed a retreating Rum Alley
child.

"Naw," responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, "dese micks can't make me
run."

Howls of renewed wrath went up from Devil's Row throats.  Tattered
gamins on the right made a furious assault on the gravel heap.  On
their small, convulsed faces there shone the grins of true assassins.
As they charged, they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus.

The little champion of Rum Alley stumbled precipitately down the other
side.  His coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was
gone.  He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was
dripping from a cut in his head.  His wan features wore a look of a
tiny, insane demon.

On the ground, children from Devil's Row closed in on their antagonist.
He crooked his left arm defensively about his head and fought with
cursing fury.  The little boys ran to and fro, dodging, hurling stones
and swearing in barbaric trebles.

From a window of an apartment house that upreared its form from amid
squat, ignorant stables, there leaned a curious woman.  Some laborers,
unloading a scow at a dock at the river, paused for a moment and
regarded the fight.  The engineer of a passive tugboat hung lazily to a
railing and watched.  Over on the Island, a worm of yellow convicts
came from the shadow of a building and crawled slowly along the river's
bank.

A stone had smashed into Jimmie's mouth.  Blood was bubbling over his
chin and down upon his ragged shirt.  Tears made furrows on his
dirt-stained cheeks.  His thin legs had begun to tremble and turn weak,
causing his small body to reel.  His roaring curses of the first part
of the fight had changed to a blasphemous chatter.

In the yells of the whirling mob of Devil's Row children there were
notes of joy like songs of triumphant savagery.  The little boys seemed
to leer gloatingly at the blood upon the other child's face.

Down the avenue came boastfully sauntering a lad of sixteen years,
although the chronic sneer of an ideal manhood already sat upon his
lips.  His hat was tipped with an air of challenge over his eye.
Between his teeth, a cigar stump was tilted at the angle of defiance.
He walked with a certain swing of the shoulders which appalled the
timid.  He glanced over into the vacant lot in which the little raving
boys from Devil's Row seethed about the shrieking and tearful child
from Rum Alley.

"Gee!" he murmured with interest.  "A scrap.  Gee!"

He strode over to the cursing circle, swinging his shoulders in a
manner which denoted that he held victory in his fists.  He approached
at the back of one of the most deeply engaged of the Devil's Row
children.

"Ah, what deh hell," he said, and smote the deeply-engaged one on the
back of the head.  The little boy fell to the ground and gave a hoarse,
tremendous howl.  He scrambled to his feet, and perceiving, evidently,
the size of his assailant, ran quickly off, shouting alarms.  The
entire Devil's Row party followed him.  They came to a stand a short
distance away and yelled taunting oaths at the boy with the chronic
sneer.  The latter, momentarily, paid no attention to them.

"What deh hell, Jimmie?" he asked of the small champion.

Jimmie wiped his blood-wet features with his sleeve.

"Well, it was dis way, Pete, see!  I was goin' teh lick dat Riley kid
and dey all pitched on me."

Some Rum Alley children now came forward.  The party stood for a moment
exchanging vainglorious remarks with Devil's Row.  A few stones were
thrown at long distances, and words of challenge passed between small
warriors.  Then the Rum Alley contingent turned slowly in the direction
of their home street.  They began to give, each to each, distorted
versions of the fight.  Causes of retreat in particular cases were
magnified.  Blows dealt in the fight were enlarged to catapultian
power, and stones thrown were alleged to have hurtled with infinite
accuracy.  Valor grew strong again, and the little boys began to swear
with great spirit.

"Ah, we blokies kin lick deh hull damn Row," said a child, swaggering.

Little Jimmie was striving to stanch the flow of blood from his cut
lips.  Scowling, he turned upon the speaker.

"Ah, where deh hell was yeh when I was doin' all deh fightin?" he
demanded.  "Youse kids makes me tired."

"Ah, go ahn," replied the other argumentatively.

Jimmie replied with heavy contempt.  "Ah, youse can't fight, Blue
Billie!  I kin lick yeh wid one han'."

"Ah, go ahn," replied Billie again.

"Ah," said Jimmie threateningly.

"Ah," said the other in the same tone.

They struck at each other, clinched, and rolled over on the cobble
stones.

"Smash 'im, Jimmie, kick deh damn guts out of 'im," yelled Pete, the
lad with the chronic sneer, in tones of delight.

The small combatants pounded and kicked, scratched and tore.  They
began to weep and their curses struggled in their throats with sobs.
The other little boys clasped their hands and wriggled their legs in
excitement.  They formed a bobbing circle about the pair.

A tiny spectator was suddenly agitated.

"Cheese it, Jimmie, cheese it!  Here comes yer fader," he yelled.

The circle of little boys instantly parted.  They drew away and waited
in ecstatic awe for that which was about to happen.  The two little
boys fighting in the modes of four thousand years ago, did not hear the
warning.

Up the avenue there plodded slowly a man with sullen eyes.  He was
carrying a dinner pail and smoking an apple-wood pipe.

As he neared the spot where the little boys strove, he regarded them
listlessly.  But suddenly he roared an oath and advanced upon the
rolling fighters.

"Here, you Jim, git up, now, while I belt yer life out, you damned
disorderly brat."

He began to kick into the chaotic mass on the ground.  The boy Billie
felt a heavy boot strike his head.  He made a furious effort and
disentangled himself from Jimmie.  He tottered away, damning.

Jimmie arose painfully from the ground and confronting his father,
began to curse him.  His parent kicked him.  "Come home, now," he
cried, "an' stop yer jawin', er I'll lam the everlasting head off yehs."

They departed.  The man paced placidly along with the apple-wood emblem
of serenity between his teeth.  The boy followed a dozen feet in the
rear.  He swore luridly, for he felt that it was degradation for one
who aimed to be some vague soldier, or a man of blood with a sort of
sublime license, to be taken home by a father.



Eventually they entered into a dark region where, from a careening
building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the
street and the gutter.  A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from
cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows.  Long streamers of
garments fluttered from fire-escapes.  In all unhandy places there were
buckets, brooms, rags and bottles.  In the street infants played or
fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles.
Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped
while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels.  Withered
persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking
pipes in obscure corners.  A thousand odors of cooking food came forth
to the street.  The building quivered and creaked from the weight of
humanity stamping about in its bowels.

A small ragged girl dragged a red, bawling infant along the crowded
ways.  He was hanging back, baby-like, bracing his wrinkled, bare legs.

The little girl cried out: "Ah, Tommie, come ahn.  Dere's Jimmie and
fader.  Don't be a-pullin' me back."

She jerked the baby's arm impatiently.  He fell on his face, roaring.
With a second jerk she pulled him to his feet, and they went on.  With
the obstinacy of his order, he protested against being dragged in a
chosen direction.  He made heroic endeavors to keep on his legs,
denounce his sister and consume a bit of orange peeling which he chewed
between the times of his infantile orations.

As the sullen-eyed man, followed by the blood-covered boy, drew near,
the little girl burst into reproachful cries.  "Ah, Jimmie, youse bin
fightin' agin."

The urchin swelled disdainfully.

"Ah, what deh hell, Mag.  See?"

The little girl upbraided him,  "Youse allus fightin', Jimmie, an' yeh
knows it puts mudder out when yehs come home half dead, an' it's like
we'll all get a poundin'."

She began to weep.  The babe threw back his head and roared at his
prospects.

"Ah, what deh hell!" cried Jimmie.  "Shut up er I'll smack yer mout'.
See?"

As his sister continued her lamentations, he suddenly swore and struck
her.  The little girl reeled and, recovering herself, burst into tears
and quaveringly cursed him.  As she slowly retreated her brother
advanced dealing her cuffs.  The father heard and turned about.

"Stop that, Jim, d'yeh hear?  Leave yer sister alone on the street.
It's like I can never beat any sense into yer damned wooden head."

The urchin raised his voice in defiance to his parent and continued his
attacks.  The babe bawled tremendously, protesting with great violence.
During his sister's hasty manoeuvres, he was dragged by the arm.

Finally the procession plunged into one of the gruesome doorways.  They
crawled up dark stairways and along cold, gloomy halls.  At last the
father pushed open a door and they entered a lighted room in which a
large woman was rampant.

She stopped in a career from a seething stove to a pan-covered table.
As the father and children filed in she peered at them.

"Eh, what?  Been fightin' agin, by Gawd!"  She threw herself upon
Jimmie.  The urchin tried to dart behind the others and in the scuffle
the babe, Tommie, was knocked down.  He protested with his usual
vehemence, because they had bruised his tender shins against a table
leg.

The mother's massive shoulders heaved with anger.  Grasping the urchin
by the neck and shoulder she shook him until he rattled.  She dragged
him to an unholy sink, and, soaking a rag in water, began to scrub his
lacerated face with it.  Jimmie screamed in pain and tried to twist his
shoulders out of the clasp of the huge arms.

The babe sat on the floor watching the scene, his face in contortions
like that of a woman at a tragedy.  The father, with a newly-ladened
pipe in his mouth, crouched on a backless chair near the stove.
Jimmie's cries annoyed him.  He turned about and bellowed at his wife:

"Let the damned kid alone for a minute, will yeh, Mary?  Yer allus
poundin' 'im.  When I come nights I can't git no rest 'cause yer allus
poundin' a kid.  Let up, d'yeh hear?  Don't be allus poundin' a kid."

The woman's operations on the urchin instantly increased in violence.
At last she tossed him to a corner where he limply lay cursing and
weeping.

The wife put her immense hands on her hips and with a chieftain-like
stride approached her husband.

"Ho," she said, with a great grunt of contempt.  "An' what in the devil
are you stickin' your nose for?"

The babe crawled under the table and, turning, peered out cautiously.
The ragged girl retreated and the urchin in the corner drew his legs
carefully beneath him.

The man puffed his pipe calmly and put his great mudded boots on the
back part of the stove.

"Go teh hell," he murmured, tranquilly.

The woman screamed and shook her fists before her husband's eyes.  The
rough yellow of her face and neck flared suddenly crimson.  She began
to howl.

He puffed imperturbably at his pipe for a time, but finally arose and
began to look out at the window into the darkening chaos of back yards.

"You've been drinkin', Mary," he said.  "You'd better let up on the
bot', ol' woman, or you'll git done."

"You're a liar.  I ain't had a drop," she roared in reply.

They had a lurid altercation, in which they damned each other's souls
with frequence.

The babe was staring out from under the table, his small face working
in his excitement.

The ragged girl went stealthily over to the corner where the urchin lay.

"Are yehs hurted much, Jimmie?" she whispered timidly.

"Not a damn bit!  See?" growled the little boy.

"Will I wash deh blood?"

"Naw!"

"Will I--"

"When I catch dat Riley kid I'll break 'is face!  Dat's right!  See?"

He turned his face to the wall as if resolved to grimly bide his time.

In the quarrel between husband and wife, the woman was victor.  The man
grabbed his hat and rushed from the room, apparently determined upon a
vengeful drunk.  She followed to the door and thundered at him as he
made his way down stairs.

She returned and stirred up the room until her children were bobbing
about like bubbles.

"Git outa deh way," she persistently bawled, waving feet with their
dishevelled shoes near the heads of her children.  She shrouded
herself, puffing and snorting, in a cloud of steam at the stove, and
eventually extracted a frying-pan full of potatoes that hissed.

She flourished it.  "Come teh yer suppers, now," she cried with sudden
exasperation.  "Hurry up, now, er I'll help yeh!"

The children scrambled hastily.  With prodigious clatter they arranged
themselves at table.  The babe sat with his feet dangling high from a
precarious infant chair and gorged his small stomach.  Jimmie forced,
with feverish rapidity, the grease-enveloped pieces between his wounded
lips.  Maggie, with side glances of fear of interruption, ate like a
small pursued tigress.

The mother sat blinking at them.  She delivered reproaches, swallowed
potatoes and drank from a yellow-brown bottle.  After a time her mood
changed and she wept as she carried little Tommie into another room and
laid him to sleep with his fists doubled in an old quilt of faded red
and green grandeur.  Then she came and moaned by the stove.  She rocked
to and fro upon a chair, shedding tears and crooning miserably to the
two children about their "poor mother" and "yer fader, damn 'is soul."

The little girl plodded between the table and the chair with a dish-pan
on it.  She tottered on her small legs beneath burdens of dishes.

Jimmie sat nursing his various wounds.  He cast furtive glances at his
mother.  His practised eye perceived her gradually emerge from a
muddled mist of sentiment until her brain burned in drunken heat.  He
sat breathless.

Maggie broke a plate.

The mother started to her feet as if propelled.

"Good Gawd," she howled.  Her eyes glittered on her child with sudden
hatred.  The fervent red of her face turned almost to purple.  The
little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake.

He floundered about in darkness until he found the stairs.  He
stumbled, panic-stricken, to the next floor.  An old woman opened a
door.  A light behind her threw a flare on the urchin's quivering face.

"Eh, Gawd, child, what is it dis time?  Is yer fader beatin' yer
mudder, or yer mudder beatin' yer fader?"



Jimmie and the old woman listened long in the hall.  Above the muffled
roar of conversation, the dismal wailings of babies at night, the
thumping of feet in unseen corridors and rooms, mingled with the sound
of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the rattling of wheels
over cobbles, they heard the screams of the child and the roars of the
mother die away to a feeble moaning and a subdued bass muttering.

The old woman was a gnarled and leathery personage who could don, at
will, an expression of great virtue.  She possessed a small music-box
capable of one tune, and a collection of "God bless yehs" pitched in
assorted keys of fervency.  Each day she took a position upon the
stones of Fifth Avenue, where she crooked her legs under her and
crouched immovable and hideous, like an idol.  She received daily a
small sum in pennies.  It was contributed, for the most part, by
persons who did not make their homes in that vicinity.

Once, when a lady had dropped her purse on the sidewalk, the gnarled
woman had grabbed it and smuggled it with great dexterity beneath her
cloak.  When she was arrested she had cursed the lady into a partial
swoon, and with her aged limbs, twisted from rheumatism, had almost
kicked the stomach out of a huge policeman whose conduct upon that
occasion she referred to when she said: "The police, damn 'em."

"Eh, Jimmie, it's cursed shame," she said.  "Go, now, like a dear an'
buy me a can, an' if yer mudder raises 'ell all night yehs can sleep
here."

Jimmie took a tendered tin-pail and seven pennies and departed.  He
passed into the side door of a saloon and went to the bar.  Straining
up on his toes he raised the pail and pennies as high as his arms would
let him.  He saw two hands thrust down and take them.  Directly the
same hands let down the filled pail and he left.

In front of the gruesome doorway he met a lurching figure.  It was his
father, swaying about on uncertain legs.

"Give me deh can.  See?" said the man, threateningly.

"Ah, come off!  I got dis can fer dat ol' woman an' it 'ud be dirt teh
swipe it.  See?" cried Jimmie.

The father wrenched the pail from the urchin.  He grasped it in both
hands and lifted it to his mouth.  He glued his lips to the under edge
and tilted his head.  His hairy throat swelled until it seemed to grow
near his chin.  There was a tremendous gulping movement and the beer
was gone.

The man caught his breath and laughed.  He hit his son on the head with
the empty pail.  As it rolled clanging into the street, Jimmie began to
scream and kicked repeatedly at his father's shins.

"Look at deh dirt what yeh done me," he yelled.  "Deh ol' woman 'ill be
raisin' hell."

He retreated to the middle of the street, but the man did not pursue.
He staggered toward the door.

"I'll club hell outa yeh when I ketch yeh," he shouted, and disappeared.

During the evening he had been standing against a bar drinking whiskies
and declaring to all comers, confidentially: "My home reg'lar livin'
hell!  Damndes' place!  Reg'lar hell!  Why do I come an' drin' whisk'
here thish way?  'Cause home reg'lar livin' hell!"

Jimmie waited a long time in the street and then crept warily up
through the building.  He passed with great caution the door of the
gnarled woman, and finally stopped outside his home and listened.

He could hear his mother moving heavily about among the furniture of
the room.  She was chanting in a mournful voice, occasionally
interjecting bursts of volcanic wrath at the father, who, Jimmie
judged, had sunk down on the floor or in a corner.

"Why deh blazes don' chere try teh keep Jim from fightin'?  I'll break
her jaw," she suddenly bellowed.

The man mumbled with drunken indifference.  "Ah, wha' deh hell.  W'a's
odds?  Wha' makes kick?"

"Because he tears 'is clothes, yeh damn fool," cried the woman in
supreme wrath.

The husband seemed to become aroused.  "Go teh hell," he thundered
fiercely in reply.  There was a crash against the door and something
broke into clattering fragments.  Jimmie partially suppressed a howl
and darted down the stairway.  Below he paused and listened.  He heard
howls and curses, groans and shrieks, confusingly in chorus as if a
battle were raging.  With all was the crash of splintering furniture.
The eyes of the urchin glared in fear that one of them would discover
him.

Curious faces appeared in doorways, and whispered comments passed to
and fro.  "Ol' Johnson's raisin' hell agin."

Jimmie stood until the noises ceased and the other inhabitants of the
tenement had all yawned and shut their doors.  Then he crawled upstairs
with the caution of an invader of a panther den.  Sounds of labored
breathing came through the broken door-panels.  He pushed the door open
and entered, quaking.

A glow from the fire threw red hues over the bare floor, the cracked
and soiled plastering, and the overturned and broken furniture.

In the middle of the floor lay his mother asleep.  In one corner of the
room his father's limp body hung across the seat of a chair.

The urchin stole forward.  He began to shiver in dread of awakening his
parents.  His mother's great chest was heaving painfully.  Jimmie
paused and looked down at her.  Her face was inflamed and swollen from
drinking.  Her yellow brows shaded eyelids that had brown blue.  Her
tangled hair tossed in waves over her forehead.  Her mouth was set in
the same lines of vindictive hatred that it had, perhaps, borne during
the fight.  Her bare, red arms were thrown out above her head in
positions of exhaustion, something, mayhap, like those of a sated
villain.

The urchin bended over his mother.  He was fearful lest she should open
her eyes, and the dread within him was so strong, that he could not
forbear to stare, but hung as if fascinated over the woman's grim face.

Suddenly her eyes opened.  The urchin found himself looking straight
into that expression, which, it would seem, had the power to change his
blood to salt.  He howled piercingly and fell backward.

The woman floundered for a moment, tossed her arms about her head as if
in combat, and again began to snore.

Jimmie crawled back in the shadows and waited.  A noise in the next
room had followed his cry at the discovery that his mother was awake.
He grovelled in the gloom, the eyes from out his drawn face riveted
upon the intervening door.

He heard it creak, and then the sound of a small voice came to him.
"Jimmie!  Jimmie!  Are yehs dere?" it whispered.  The urchin started.
The thin, white face of his sister looked at him from the door-way of
the other room.  She crept to him across the floor.

The father had not moved, but lay in the same death-like sleep.  The
mother writhed in uneasy slumber, her chest wheezing as if she were in
the agonies of strangulation.  Out at the window a florid moon was
peering over dark roofs, and in the distance the waters of a river
glimmered pallidly.

The small frame of the ragged girl was quivering.  Her features were
haggard from weeping, and her eyes gleamed from fear.  She grasped the
urchin's arm in her little trembling hands and they huddled in a
corner.  The eyes of both were drawn, by some force, to stare at the
woman's face, for they thought she need only to awake and all fiends
would come from below.

They crouched until the ghost-mists of dawn appeared at the window,
drawing close to the panes, and looking in at the prostrate, heaving
body of the mother.

 The novel opens with a street battle between young boys from rival parts of the Bowery. The champion fighting for the "honor of Rum Alley" against the "Devil's Row" battalion is Jimmie. He fights with blind ferocity and innate savagery, even after his allies have run away. Finally, he is rescued from underneath a pile of assailants by Pete, a scornful and self-confident teenager. Almost immediately, Jimmie begins to fight with another boy. This fight is broken up by his father, who happens upon the scuffle and kicks the children into submission, dragging Jimmie home with him. Back in the foul shadows of the "gruesome" tenement doorways, father and son meet other relatives, Maggie and Tommie, respectively the family's elder daughter and infant son. The combative Jimmie gets into a fight with Maggie, but his aggression seems only a pale imitation compared to what is to come. The family troops into the tenement for an encounter with Mary, the family matriarch, an alcoholic who immediately flies into a rage. After a fight, she chases her husband out of the house; he goes to drink himself into a stupor, to escape the "living hell" that is his home. The children, terrified of their mother, shrink into the corners. When Maggie breaks a plate, Mary again becomes apoplectic with fury, and Jimmie flees the apartment, seeking shelter with an old woman who lives in the same tenement house. The old woman sends him to go buy her beer, in return for which she will let him sleep in her apartment. He goes, but at the bar meets his father, who steals the beer. When Jimmie finally returns to the apartment, he finds his parents collapsed in alcoholic oblivion after another catastrophic fight. He sneaks in, terrified of his mother, and finds Maggie still awake; clutching each other, they hide in the corner until dawn.

