All his life had Billy
Byrne fed upon excitement and adventure. As gangster, thug,
holdup man and second-story artist Billy had found food for
his appetite within the dismal, sooty streets of Chicago's great
West Side, and then Fate had flung him upon the savage
shore of Yoka to find other forms of adventure where the
best that is in a strong man may be brought out in the stern
battle for existence against primeval men and conditions. The
West Side had developed only Billy's basest characteristics. He
might have slipped back easily into the old ways had it not
been for HER and the recollection of that which he had read in
her eyes. Love had been there; but greater than that to hold a
man into the straight and narrow path of decency and honor
had been respect and admiration. It had seemed incredible to
Billy that a goddess should feel such things for him--for the
same man her scornful lips once had branded as coward and
mucker; yet he had read the truth aright, and since then Billy
Byrne had done his best according to the fight that had been
given him to deserve the belief she had in him.
So far there had crept into his consciousness no disquieting
doubts as to the consistency of his recent action in joining
the force of a depredating Mexican outlaw.
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