Chapter 27

Adventures of moment had also fallen to the lot of Jimmy Knight on this day. Lacking the hospitality of Tony's back room, Jim had of late taken up loafing-quarters in a Seventh Avenue saloon, frequented by a coterie of parasitic young men who subsisted on the crowds which passed daily in and out of the Pennsylvania Station. On the very afternoon of the Melcher raid Jim was sitting at a table with one of these fellows, lending a willing ear to tales of easy money, when he felt a touch upon his shoulder and, looking up, found a plain-clothes man standing over him. The stranger wore no visible badge of authority, but Jim knew him instantly for what he was. In the background another person with the same indefinable stamp of the bull watched proceedings with an expressionless face.

Now Jim had the heart of a rabbit, and, being forever busy in "framing" some one, his first suspicion was that he himself was being framed. This suspicion proved all too correct. Never in his worst dreams had he experienced anything so distressing as what followed his arrest, for it seemed as if these officers cherished a personal grudge against him. They seemed prejudiced for no reason whatever, and they made their aversion patent in several professionally effective ways. Jim found his arms twisted backward and upward until his bones cracked and his joints came loose; with wrists pinioned behind his shoulder-blades and walking on his toes he was propelled into the street. Since this was his first arrest, he did not know enough to go quietly, and when one of his captors released his grip he tried to wrench himself loose. Cossacks could not mistreat a prisoner more brutally than these policemen mistreated poor, cringing, spineless Jimmy Knight. He reached the station-house more dead than alive, and then when he saw a loaded revolver removed from his own pocket he utterly collapsed. Weeping like a woman, he was led to a cell and left to meditate upon the inconsistencies and injustices of the Sullivan law.

As the hours crept by and his efforts to obtain assistance proved unavailing he began to understand something of Young Sullivan's and Armistead's feelings. Then light came to him; he learned of the disaster to the Metropolitan Club and immediately lost faith in Melcher's ability to help him, with the result that when he was finally led to Inspector Snell's office for the third degree he "squealed" promptly. In his panic to save himself he volunteered even more of his private history than the Inspector desired to hear, and was only too willing to make known all of the facts of the Hammon case. Nor did he withhold the truth about the present attempt at blackmailing Bob Wharton and Merkle; the first question along this line served to unlock his lips, and he whiningly laid bare the entire conspiracy. It seemed, however, that his earnest desire to help the law was scarcely appreciated, for even after he had blindly affixed his signature