His first act was to marry Rose; his second to let it be known throughout the East Side that he was no longer marching in the forefront of crime.  This ultimatum started a procession of wrongdoers to Marrow Lane.  They came singly, in threes and fours, humble and afraid; men of substance, gun-men, the athletic, the diseased, fat crooks, thin crooks, saloon-keepers and policemen, Italians and Slavs, short noses and long (many—­many of them), two clergymen, two bankers, sharp-eyed children, married women who were childless, unmarried women who weren’t—­and all these came trembling and with but the one thought:  “Is he going to tell what he knows about us?”

He was not.  Some he bullied a little, for habit is strong; some he treated with laughter and irony, some with wit, and some with kindness and deep understanding.  He might have been an able shepherd going to work on a hopelessly numerous black and ramshackle flock of sheep.  He couldn’t expect to make model citizens out of all his old heelers; he couldn’t expect to turn more than fifty per cent of his two clergymen into the paths of righteousness.  But with the young criminals he took much pains, giving money where it would do good, and advice whether it would do good or not.  Among the first to come to him was Kid Shannon.

“Now look a-here,” said the Kid, “I bin good and bad by turns till I don’t know which side is top side.  But this minute I’m good—­d’you get me?  If you want to jail me you kin do it, nobody easier; but don’t do it!  You was always a bigger man than me, and when you led I followed—­for a real man had rather follow a strong bad man than a good slob any day.  You out of the lead, I got nothing to follow but me own wishes, and they’re all to the good these days.”

“A woman?” said Blizzard sternly.

“She ain’t a woman yet,” said the Kid, “and she ain’t a kid—­she’s about half-past girl o’clock, and she thinks there’s no better man in the United States than always truly yours, Kid Shannon.  I got a good saloon business, and nothing crooked on hand but what’s past and done with, and I looks to you to give a fellow a chance.  Do I get it?  Jail ain’t goin’ to help me, and it would break her.  Look here, sport:  I want to be good.”

“Kid,” said Blizzard, “no man that wants to be good need be afraid of me.  You’d have been a good boy always—­if it hadn’t been for me. I know that as well as you.  I’ve got the past all written down in my head.  I can’t rub it out.  But any man that’s got the nerve can put new writing across and across the old, until the old can’t be read, or if it could would read like a joke.  You can tell whomsoever it concerns to do well and fear nothing.  At first I thought to tell Lichtenstein every first and last thing that I knew about this city, and he tried to make me tell.  We had a meeting, Old Abe and I did.  I was always afraid of the little Jew, Kid.  Well, face to face, I wasn’t.  He talked, and I talked.  And I was the stronger.  He lets me go scot-free, and I don’t tell anything.  If others get you for what you’ve done, it can’t be helped.  But none of you’ll be got through me.  The past is buried; but if in the future any of you fellows start anything, and I hear of it—­look out”