“Oh, is that what you wish to know, Slippery?  Well they are in a private flat on South Clark, just below LaSalle Street, second house from the corner, on the fifth floor, and a dandy place at that, but,” here he paused and with an ill-disguised look of resentment he stared at Joe and then queried:  “Slippery, whose boy have you toting along with you?” And as Slippery did not promptly answer him he added with contempt in his voice, “I always understood that only a low-lived plinger dragged a road kid about with him and never a proper crook.”  Then to Joe’s terror, he heard the man whom he had until this moment taken to be as honorable as his own late father answer:  “Boston Frank, this lad is the wisest and shrewdest young crook that ever walked the streets of Chicago.”  This explanation pleased Boston Frank, who now asked Slippery to introduce him to the lad, which the former did, using his new nickname, “Dakota Joe.”  Listening to their further conversation, to his horror Joe became for the first time aware that Slippery was not a man looking for an honest job, but a criminal whose dislike for the police, which he had so openly manifested, was the natural result of the life he had been leading.  Joe decided to keep this unpleasant discovery to himself, as he was a penniless lad in the center of an immense city.

When they parted company with Boston Frank, Slippery and Joe found the house that he had described to be the “gang’s” hangout, and after they had climbed five flights up a narrow stairway, Slippery rang the door bell of a flat.  A shutter in the panel of the door that fitted so perfectly into an opening that Joe did not observe its presence before, was withdrawn and from behind a heavy wire screen a pair of glistening, suspicious eyes searched their faces, and then a voice demanded what they desired.  Instead of an answer Slippery gave some differently sounding knocks upon the panel above the screened opening and whispered, “It’s I, Slippery, the yegg.”

Joe could distinctly hear the same person who had carefully replaced the shutter over the once more invisible spy-opening unbolt, then unlock and finally slowly open the door, and after she, a middle-aged woman, had again most suspiciously scanned the features of her visitors, she permitted Slippery and Joe to slip within the slightly opened door, that she promptly shut, and then bolted and carefully locked, as if the flat, instead of a home for human beings was a safe-deposit vault of an immensely rich bank.

“Hello, Marie,” Slippery addressed the woman after she had tried the door knob to assure herself that the steel sheeted door was as correctly closed as before she opened it, “how are you and the rest of the gang?” And while they shook hands Joe looked about in the semi-darkness of the hallway trying to see some members of the gang Slippery had spoken about when he inquired of Boston Frank as to their whereabouts, and about whom he had just repeated the question, which to Joe seemed odd because there was not a sound to be heard in the flat, that, as it was supposed to be the home of a “gang”, should have at least shown these signs of human habitation.