Again they reckoned without his knowledge of the area, for Tom lunged suddenly, meeting them as they came, and his iron-hard fist clipped the nearest man. The man fell. Leaping past him Shanaghy darted up a stair with the men hot after him. As he topped the flight, he turned. Then grasping a rail in either hand, he swung both feet up and kicked out hard. The boot heels caught the nearest man in the face and he toppled, knocking those behind him backward down the stairs. Again Shanaghy escaped over the roofs.
When he came warily down from the roofs, a few doors from his room, he held himself still in the doorway while he looked carefully around. He was hot and tired. He wanted nothing so much as to climb the stairs to his own room and fall on the bed, yet he was wary.
He had started to leave the doorway where he was hidden when he caught a flicker of movement in the shadows up the street. Was it a harmless drunk sleeping it off in a doorway? Or some of Childers’s men waiting for him? No use taking the chance. He went back to the roofs. Almost a block further along, he descended to McCarthy’s blacksmith shop. The place was locked and silent, so he crawled into a wagon, pulled a spare canvas wagon sheet over him and went to sleep.
Shanaghy awakened to the clang of McCarthy’s hammer. He sat up, rubbing his eyes. The sides of the wagon were high, and he could not see the wagonyard or the doorway to the shop. He stood up, grasped the side of the wagon and swung himself over. As his feet hit the ground he heard a rush of feet behind him. Instantly he ducked under the wagon and came up on the other side. A man started under the wagon after him, and Shanaghy kicked him in the head, then turned to face the two who had come around the end of the wagon. One of them yelled, “There he is! Get him!”
Suddenly McCarthy was in the door of his shop, holding a hammer. “One at a time!” he shouted. “Or I’ll bust some skulls!”
The man who came at him was a beefy shoulder-striker from Childers’s crew. It was a big, broad man with blond hair and a florid face who rushed at Shanaghy. The moment he put up his two hamlike fists, Shanaghy knew he might be good in a rough-and-tumble, but he was no boxer. The man came in, looping a wide right for Shanaghy’s chin, and Shanaghy crouched and came in whipping two underhanded punches into the bigger man’s belly.
The two punches were perfectly timed. A right to the belly, a left to the same place and then an overhand cross to the chin, and the man went down. He tried to get up but slumped back down into the dirt.
Turning sharply, Shanaghy hit the other man before he expected it, knocking every bit of wind out of him. As the man doubled up, Shanaghy gave him a knee in the face.
The first one was crawling out from under the wagon, a streak of blood on his face. He held up a hand. “No! No! I quit!”
“Be off with you, then,” Shanaghy said, “but don’t come looking for me again.” When they had gone, Shanaghy went into the blacksmith shop and pumped a bucketful of water from the well. He stripped to the waist and bathed his chest and shoulders, then dampened his hair and combed it out. “Well,” McCarthy said dryly, “it seems you can fight a little, and it seems you must. They be upon you, lad.”
“Aye. I slipped them last night when they lay waiting at my house.” Tom dried his hands. “I think I must take it to them a bit.” “Be careful, lad. There’s a mean man there, that Eben Childers. He’s a hard one, and cold. And his boys … You met the least of them in Bob. There’s others … worse.”
McCarthy watched Tom put on his shirt. “Lad, why don’t you go west? There’s a deal of land out there, and a chance for a young man.” “Land? I’m no farmer, Mac.”
“Aye, that you aren’t. But what are you, then? A shoulder-striker for Morrissey? A street thug? A bum? Look at yourself, lad, and look well. Just exactly what are you? A fine broth of a lad who is nothing … Nothing, do y’ hear me? And if you stay here hanging about with thugs, cardsharps and the like, you’ll be nothing more until they pick you from the gutter some day.” Shanaghy glared at him. “Have a care, old man.” “Old man, is it? Well, I’ve grown old … Will you ever? You’ll end with a broken skull some night and they’ll have you off to bury in potter’s field. “What are you that any bum along the street is not? There’s ten thousand like you in Five Points and they’ll all die and come to nothing. You’re young, and the land is wide. Why stay here where there’s few chances? Why not go west? You could study law, study anything, make a man of yourself.” “I’m not a man?” Tom doubled his arm. “Look at that. Eighteen inches of biceps.
Who can say I’m not a man?”
“Aye, you’re strong, but what else are you? Have you got the brains God gave you? Or a head fit only for butting, like a billy goat? “If a man is to be something, if he is to be a man, he’s got to be more than muscle. He’s got to do something wi’ himself. Get an honest trade, a bit of land, a house of your own, if it is only of sod. Here your friends pat you on the back and let you buy them drinks or whatever, but when you get old and fat and sloppy they’ll drop you for others. Men like you are born to be used and tossed aside … if you let it happen.”
“What are you? A priest? When did you start preaching, Mac?” “It’s a bit of warning, that’s all. You’re a fine lad, so why become what you’re becoming? There’s a bigger, wider world than any slum, and a man only stays there because he hasn’t the guts to get out. There’s other people, other places, and you can make new friends, worthwhile friends.” Shanaghy stared at McCarthy with disgust. He picked up his coat and slung it over his shoulder. “Thanks for keepin’ them off me,” he said, and walked away into the sunlight.
He strode down the street, heading for Morrissey’s nearest saloon … the Gem. Talking to himself as he walked along, he growled angry retorts at the distant McCarthy, saying all the things he had not said. But suddenly they began to sound very hollow and empty.
What was he, after all? He’d ridden a few races but he was too heavy for that now. He’d won a few fights in the ring, but he’d no desire to make a profession of that. He was at the beck and call of Morrissey and Lochlin, who were important men, in their way. But what was he, himself? He shook himself irritably. It was not a subject on which he cared to dwell.
McCarthy … well, what did he know? Who was he to talk? Yet even as Tom thought this, his good sense told him that McCarthy wasn’t worried about anybody laying for him when he came home of a night, and he was sleeping sound. Nor was he beholden to anybody for the money he made. He did his job, he did it well, and he took his pay and went home. Now Shanaghy remembered that time all too well. He had stopped on a street corner, thinking about it. He was no farmer, he’d considered, but still there were towns out west. And if he went to one of them, knowing what he knew, he could become a big man, as big as Morrissey or bigger. He had fiddled around with the idea and decided he liked it. What was that place out west? San Francisco? He’d heard of it … There was gold out there, they said.
Maybe … he’d give it some thought.
Two days later he approached Morrissey. “Mr. Morrissey? Have you got some kind of a job for me? A permanent job?”
Morrissey rolled the cigar in his teeth, then spat into the spittoon, “That I have, lad.” He paused. “Did you ever do any shooting?” “Shooting? With a gun?” Shanaghy shook his head. “No, I haven’t.” “You can learn. I’ve got a shooting gallery. Man who handled it for me turned into a drunk. You learn to shoot, you get one-fifth of the take.” He paused. “You try knocking down on me, bye, an’ I’ll have your hide off.”