“Shun all tricks and crosses too,

For honesty is stronger,

And hold all rascals up to view—

Wait a little longer…”

He crouched over his defeated enemy, who, as he held his callused hand, felt not at all like an enemy, but a fellow working sort. The Captain was—had been—a fighting man above all else. This was the reason for Mickey shipping with him, because The Captain, in his heart of hearts, needed a scrapper on his crew. So off he had come to the jailhouse and set Mickey free. But here on this wicked shore, under that sour falling sun that had just now ceased to witness the terrible events of the day, The Captain’s code of honor—based all around as it was on fighting—had brought them to this terrible end.

Mickey Durst felt the truth of it in his strong bones.

One could not very well leave a fellow white man to be overhauled and butchered by savages. But who appeared the savage now: this calm, tireless, forgiving combatant—a copper-skinned catholic boy grown tiresomely old, or the reeking, gibbering, cavorting white man—a goddamned British bastard…the very sort that had sent Mickey packing from Ireland when he was but nine?

Mickey felt suddenly more than empty, less than lost.

The streets of Baltimore and their rival gangs had been his mother for these seven years. Scrapping in barrooms, alleys, and in the prize ring had been his father. His mother, such as she was, was a world away on this lonely night. And his father—the way of fists, shoes, knives and bricks—his answer to things, had proved wanting. The gut-wrenching knowledge—for he had never felt more sure about a thing—that he had killed the wrong man, was made all the more terrible by the fact that he had killed his first man.

He looked up at Blackie Boy Clay and heard himself speak as if from a distance, “I b’lieve Blackie, that I just knocked the life out a the wrong man.”

The dirty man than began to leap and cavort more furiously, screaming ‘Dick!’’ over and over into the darkened night, as if he had just defied some fellow named Dick, a fellow that he did not expect to escape.

Blackie then looked him back in his eyes after stealing a glance at the tall crazed fool, and said in his gravely old man voice, “That is a devil’s dance if ever there was one.”

Mickey rose on wooden feet, no longer spry with the joy of the fight, and stalked toward the Madman, intent on ending this evil insanity once and for all. Sam was crying like a wide-eyed baby over the body of that tyrant Heel. Blackie was behind him imploring him to be careful, “He has the Devil up in him Mickey. Take a care!”

Then the floor of his wooden world slid from beneath his feet.