It was upon an occasion of this nature that an event occurred which was fated later to change the entire course of Billy Byrne’s life.  Upon the West Side the older gangs are jealous of the sanctity of their own territory.  Outsiders do not trespass with impunity.  From Halsted to Robey, and from Lake to Grand lay the broad hunting preserve of Kelly’s gang, to which Billy had been almost born, one might say.  Kelly owned the feed-store back of which the gang had loafed for years, and though himself a respectable businessman his name had been attached to the pack of hoodlums who held forth at his back door as the easiest means of locating and identifying its motley members.

The police and citizenry of this great territory were the natural enemies and prey of Kelly’s gang, but as the kings of old protected the deer of their great forests from poachers, so Kelly’s gang felt it incumbent upon them to safeguard the lives and property which they considered theirs by divine right.  It is doubtful that they thought of the matter in just this way, but the effect was the same.

And so it was that as Billy Byrne wended homeward alone in the wee hours of the morning after emptying the cash drawer of old Schneider’s saloon and locking the weeping Schneider in his own ice box, he was deeply grieved and angered to see three rank outsiders from Twelfth Street beating Patrolman Stanley Lasky with his own baton, the while they simultaneously strove to kick in his ribs with their heavy boots.

Now Lasky was no friend of Billy Byrne; but the officer had been born and raised in the district and was attached to the Twenty-eighth Precinct Station on Lake Street near Ashland Avenue, and so was part and parcel of the natural possession of the gang.  Billy felt that it was entirely ethical to beat up a cop, provided you confined your efforts to those of your own district; but for a bunch of yaps from south of Twelfth Street to attempt to pull off any such coarse work in his bailiwick—­why it was unthinkable.

A hero and rescuer of lesser experience than Billy Byrne would have rushed melodramatically into the midst of the fray, and in all probability have had his face pushed completely through the back of his head, for the guys from Twelfth Street were not of the rah-rah-boy type of hoodlum —­they were bad men, with an upper case B. So Billy crept stealthily along in the shadows until he was quite close to them, and behind them.  On the way he had gathered up a cute little granite paving block, than which there is nothing in the world harder, not even a Twelfth Street skull.  He was quite close now to one of the men—­he who was wielding the officer’s club to such excellent disadvantage to the officer —­and then he raised the paving block only to lower it silently and suddenly upon the back of that unsuspecting head —­“and then there were two.”