This goes to explain why Cork McManus went into Rooney’s one night and there looked upon the bright, stranger face of Romance for the first time in his precarious career.

Until Tim Corrigan should return from his jaunt among Kings and Princes and hold up his big white finger in private offices, it was unsafe for Cork in any of the old haunts of his gang.  So he lay, perdu, in the high rear room of a Capulet, reading pink sporting sheets and cursing the slow paddle wheels of the Kaiser Wilhelm.

It was on Thursday evening that Cork’s seclusion became intolerable to him.  Never a hart panted for water fountain as he did for the cool touch of a drifting stein, for the firm security of a foot-rail in the hollow of his shoe and the quiet, hearty challenges of friendship and repartee along and across the shining bars.  But he must avoid the district where he was known.  The cops were looking for him everywhere, for news was scarce, and the newspapers were harping again on the failure of the police to suppress the gangs.  If they got him before Corrigan came back, the big white finger could not be uplifted; it would be too late then.  But Corrigan would be home the next day, so he felt sure there would be small danger in a little excursion that night among the crass pleasures that represented life to him.

At half-past twelve McManus stood in a darkish cross-town street looking up at the name “Rooney’s,” picked out by incandescent lights against a signboard over a second-story window.  He had heard of the place as a tough “hang-out”; with its frequenters and its locality he was unfamiliar.  Guided by certain unerring indications common to all such resorts, he ascended the stairs and entered the large room over the cafe.

Here were some twenty or thirty tables, at this time about half-filled with Rooney’s guests.  Waiters served drinks.  At one end a human pianola with drugged eyes hammered the keys with automatic and furious unprecision.  At merciful intervals a waiter would roar or squeak a song—­songs full of “Mr. Johnsons” and “babes” and “coons”—­historical word guaranties of the genuineness of African melodies composed by red waistcoated young gentlemen, natives of the cotton fields and rice swamps of West Twenty-eighth Street.

For one brief moment you must admire Rooney with me as he receives, seats, manipulates, and chaffs his guests.  He is twenty-nine.  He has Wellington’s nose, Dante’s chin, the cheek-bones of an Iroquois, the smile of Talleyrand, Corbett’s foot work, and the poise of an eleven-year-old East Side Central Park Queen of the May.  He is assisted by a lieutenant known as Frank, a pudgy, easy chap, swell-dressed, who goes among the tables seeing that dull care does not intrude.  Now, what is there about Rooney’s to inspire all this pother?  It is more respectable by daylight; stout ladies with children and mittens and bundles and unpedigreed dogs drop up of afternoons