By night they plied their real
vocations. By day they sat in the alley behind the feedstore
and drank beer from a battered tin pail.
The question of labor involved in transporting the pail,
empty, to the saloon across the street, and returning it, full,
to the alley back of the feed-store was solved by the presence
of admiring and envious little boys of the neighborhood who
hung, wide-eyed and thrilled, about these heroes of their
childish lives.
Billy Byrne, at six, was rushing the can for this noble
band, and incidentally picking up his knowledge of life and
the rudiments of his education. He gloried in the fact that
he was personally acquainted with "Eddie" Welch, and that
with his own ears he had heard "Eddie" tell the gang how
he stuck up a guy on West Lake Street within fifty yards
of the Twenty-eighth Precinct Police Station.
The kindergarten period lasted until Billy was ten; then
he commenced "swiping" brass faucets from vacant buildings
and selling them to a fence who ran a junkshop on Lincoln
Street near Kinzie.
From this man he obtained the hint that graduated him
to a higher grade, so that at twelve he was robbing freight
cars in the yards along Kinzie Street, and it was about this
same time that he commenced to find pleasure in the feel of
his fist against the jaw of a fellow-man.
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