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On the sixth raid an outcry rose and an ambush fell upon them. Flashes of incredibly vivid actinic flame leaped from queer engines that opened upon them. Curious small truncheonlike weapons spat paralyzing electric shocks upon them. The twelve gangsters fought with the desperation of cornered rats, with notched and explosive bullets and with streams of lead from tommy-guns.
The professional labor leader evolved, motivated by his own interests and finally becoming, in his despotic control of the union, backed by goon squads and gangsters, as powerful a man as was to be found in the country. Seldom were strikes any longer held to better the condition of the individual union members.
"I got two guns not a woid from youse!" His erstwhile amiable physiognomy, now gnarled into an unrecognizable mask of low villainy bespoke his desperate earnestness. The men obeyed. This was apparently a gangster, of gangsters their fear of the dire vengeance of a rival organization of cut-throats instilled an obedience more humble than any other threats.
And I know, now, why from the very first I disliked the second mate. And I understand that live thing, that other thing, that lurks within and peers out through the eyes. I have recognized the same thing in the three gangsters for'ard. Like the second mate, they are prison birds. The restraint, the secrecy, and iron control of prison life has developed in all of them terrible other selves.
The main floor was strewn with tables round which sat a motley gathering of gangsters, fools, pretty iniquities and others by no stretch of the imagination to be termed pretty, confidence men, gambling touts, and the sprinkling of drunkards plain, common, transient, periodical, suburban, habitual, and unconscious for and by whom the place was, and is, maintained.
And then he watched as a lively, tiny sketch grew on the black slab, showing half a dozen men, garbed almost as Tommy was, using weapons which could only be sub-machine guns and automatic pistols. They were obviously Jacaro's gangsters. The pilot handed over the plate and watched absorbedly as Tommy fumbled with the stylus. He drew, not well but well enough, an outline of the towers of New York.
"A couple of hundred years ago, they had something they called the Sullivan Law," Cardon told him. "Private citizens weren't even allowed to own pistols. But the gangsters and hoodlums seemed to be able to get hold of all the pistols they wanted, and burp guns, too. I know of four or five racket gangs in this area that have aircraft like that, based up in the Adirondacks, at secret fields.
They own big interests and the gambling privileges in the saloons, and they get their graft from the gangsters. Then about twice a year they give a picnic for the mothers and babies of the drunkards who patronize their saloons.
"Why, say," he urged, "once I jumped into that fo'c's'le, at close range, I'd start right in, blim-blam-blim, fast as you could wink, nailing them gangsters, an' Bombini, an' the Sheeny, an' Deacon, an' the Cockney, an' Mulligan Jacobs, an' . . . an' . . . Waltham." "That would be mine," I smiled. "You've only eight shots in your Colt." Mr. Pike considered a moment, and revised his list.
"What have they been trying to put over with that militia, anyway?" "Put protection over state property because such mouths as yours have been making threats ever since election. But just as soon as it was realized that good citizens, like the most of these here, were misunderstanding the situation and were likely to be used as tools of gangsters, out went the militia! You saw it go, didn't you?"
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