Part 1

The novel opens with young Jimmie in the midst of a street fight "for the honor of Rum Alley," a tenement street in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century. Jimmie is caught up in the "fury of battle" as he is continually assaulted by a gang of children from nearby Devil's Row. He alone defends his street after his compatriots have run off. Some workmen watch the bruised and bloody-faced boy with mild interest and no intervention until a sixteen-year-old boy named Pete approaches and, after recognizing Jimmie, pulls the assailants off of him. When Jimmie's friends return, the child upbraids them for leaving him to fend for himself until he gets into a fight with one of them. Jimmie's father soon arrives and breaks up the fight by kicking his son and his combatant. The battered boy then sullenly follows his father...