The Styx Read Online Free PDF Page A

the ready and the boy had curled to a ball, his elbows over his ears to protect his head, when the whipping sound of thin metal swept through the cold air and a shaft caught the gang member on the outside tendon of his support leg and dropped him like a sack of grain.
    “Christ, Screechy, you should know how the hell to keep out of the big boys’ brawls by now,” Byrne said, standing over the both of them now with a metal baton in his hand that he’d pulled from his waistcoat. The boy peeked up at Byrne between skinny forearms and a smile started to come to his eye but quickly changed when they both heard the rustle of leaves. The Pinkerton detective’s baton was still pointing down when a fist crashed against his temple.
    Byrne rolled away at the last second and the punch caught him but had lost most of its force. The quick move also caused his attacker’s weight to carry him past and Byrne used his pivot to bring the baton across the back of the man’s head. He went face first into the dirt. But a companion was on Byrne immediately. Reinforcements had followed, but so too had Byrne’s Pinkertons and the row was on.

    He woke, as usual, freezing his ass off and dreading the darkness that would surely greet him as soon as he could pry his crusted eyes open. Byrne pulled the blanket tighter, curled his shoulders in and felt the pull of his clothes against the bed linens. He found the strength to move his feet and was relieved to find that he had at least taken off his brogans before climbing into bed. Yet, he still winced at the thought of putting his feet to wooden floors that were chilled like pond ice and then slipping his feet into frozen shoes. Which then, he thought, was going to be warming which?
    He finally gained the willpower to force open his right eyelid and spied the dull light seeping through the northern window of the room. But when he squinted, he felt the small crackle and pull of blood-caked skin at the side of his face and quickly recalled the slam of a fist against his temple last night, his own retaliatory swing of his baton and the blur of adrenaline and the scrape and shove and wrestle of bodies and shouts and whistles of a familiar chaos.
    Christ! He let his fingers come out from under the blanket and immediately probed around inside his lips, touching and counting his teeth, feeling for unnatural gaps and then recalling big Jack’s toast to his smile, before the row, before he and his boys had left most of the Five Points flank men lying in the rotting leaves moaning from the precise whippings from their batons. None of his own men had suffered more than minor bruises, and to avoid any more confrontation, they’d grabbed Screechy by the scruff of the neck and hauled him back to McSorely’s and forced him to drink a pint of lager and ordered several more rounds for themselves.
    “Aye, Michael,” Brennan had said. “My forewarnin’ to anyone worth a listen about that steel whip of yours shoulda reached that Five Pointer puttin’ the boot to young Screechy.” Brennan had leaned in conspiratorially. “And I swear I heard Danny’s voice comin’ out of your own mouth when you sent the boy packin’. Just like your old brother done to you when you were just a straggler on the gang fights.”
    Byrne had tipped his last mug to mark the memory then barely recalled making his way in the dark with Brennan to his tenement south of Hamilton Fish Park. There was a blurred recollection of hugging his mate in a farewell while the both of them stood staring at the lights strung above the newly finished structure of the Williamsburg Bridge.
    “You get out, you lucky bastard. Get out of this city before the bloody rats eat us all,” Jack Brennan had said. “Go on to Florida, wherever the hell that is, and make a life for yerself away from this place.”
    Now it was his day of leaving. Yet he did not bolt from bed. He had plenty of time. Late morning train out. He lay still instead, watching his own