Little Maxie and his Golden Hand, otherwise his Kytie--her name was Kate--had a clean little house near Washington Square on the south. They owned a piano and a telephone--the latter was purely defensive--and their two children went to school, and sat book to book with the children of honest men and women. The little quiet home, with its piano and defensive telephone, is gone now. Little Maxie died and his Golden Hand married again; for there's no false sentiment in Gangland. If a husband's dead he's dead, and there's nothing made by mourning. Likewise, what's most wanted in any husband is that he should be a live one. Little Maxie died in a rather curious way. Some say he was drowned by his pals, Big Mike among them. The story runs that there was a quarrel over splitting up a touch, and the mob charged Little Maxie with holding out. Be that as it may, the certainty is that Little Maxie and his mob, being in Peekskill, got exceeding drunk--all but Little Maxie--and went out in a boat. Being out, Little Maxie went overboard abruptly, and never came up. Neither did anybody go after him. The mob returned to town to weep--crocodile tears, some said--into their beer, as they told and re-told their loss, and in due time Little Maxie's body drifted ashore and was buried. That was the end. Had it been some trust-thief of a millionaire, there would have been an investigation. But Little Maxie was only a pick-pocket. Big Mike, like all strong characters, had his weakness. His weakness was punching Chinamen; fairly speaking, it grew to be his fad. It wasn't necessary that a Chinaman do anything; it was enough that he came within reach. Mike would knock him cold. In a single saunter through Pell Street, he had been known to leave as many as four senseless Chinamen behind him, fruits of his fist. “For,” said Mike, in cheerful exposition of the motive which underlay that performance, “I do so like to beat them monks about! I'd sooner slam one of 'em ag'inst th' wall than smoke th' pipe.” One time and another Mike punched two-thirds of all the pig-tailed heads in Chinatown. Commonly he confined himself to punching, though once or twice he went a step beyond. Lee Dok he nearly brained with a stool. But Lee Dok had been insultingly slow in getting out of Mike's way. Mike was proud of his name and place as the Terror of Chinatown. Whether he walked in Mott or Pell or Doyers Street, every Chinaman who saw him coming went inside and locked his door. Those who didn't see him and so go inside and dock their doors--and they were few--he promptly soaked. And if to see a Chinaman run was as incense to Mike's nose, to soak one became nothing less than a sweet morsel under his tongue. The wonder was that Mike didn't get shot or knifed, which miracle went not undiscussed at such centers as Tony's, Barney Flynn's, Jimmy Kelly's and the Chatham Club. But so it was; the pig-tailed population of Chinatown parted before Mike's rush like so much water.