Grand Avenue would be the easiest place to forget his
sorrow--her he could never forget. And then, his newly
awakened pride urged him back to the haunts of his former
life that he might, as he would put it himself, show them. He
wanted the gang to see that he, Billy Byrne, wasn't afraid to
be decent. He wanted some of the neighbors to realize that he
could work steadily and earn an honest living, and he looked
forward with delight to the pleasure and satisfaction of rubbing
it in to some of the saloon keepers and bartenders who
had helped keep him drunk some five days out of seven, for
Billy didn't drink any more.
But most of all he wanted to vindicate himself in the eyes
of the once-hated law. He wanted to clear his record of the
unjust charge of murder which had sent him scurrying out of
Chicago over a year before, that night that Patrolman Stanley
Lasky of the Lake Street Station had tipped him off that
Sheehan had implicated him in the murder of old man Schneider.
Now Billy Byrne had not killed Schneider. He had been
nowhere near the old fellow's saloon at the time of the
holdup; but Sheehan, who had been arrested and charged
with the crime, was an old enemy of Billy's, and Sheehan had
seen a chance to divert some of the suspicion from himself
and square accounts with Byrne at the same time.
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