Ike the Blood received us gracefully, if not enthusiastically, and was so polite as to put me on a friendly footing with his companions. Greetings over, and settled to something like our ease, I engaged myself mentally in taking Ike's picture. His forehead narrow, back-sloping at that lively angle identified by carpenters as a quarter-pitch, was not the forehead of a philosopher. I got the impression, too, that his small brown eyes, sad rather than malignant, would in any heat of anger blaze like twin balls of brown fire. Cheek-bones high; nose beaky, predatory--such a nose as Napoleon loved in his marshals; mouth coarsely sensitive, suggesting temperament; the broad, bony jaw giving promise of what staying qualities constitute the stock in trade of a bulldog; no mustache, no beard; a careless liberality of ear--that should complete the portrait. Fairly given, it was the picture of one who acted more than he thought, and whose atmosphere above all else conveyed the feeling of relentless force--the picture of one who under different circumstances might have been a Murat or a Massena. My friend managed the conversation, and did it with Central Office tact. Knowing what I was after, he brought up Gangland and the gangs, upon which topics Whitey Dutch, seeing no reasons for silence, spoke instructively. Aside from the great gangs, the Eastmans and the Five Points, I learned that other smaller yet independent gangs existed. Also, from Whitey's discourse, it was made clear that just as countries had frontiers, so also were there frontiers to the countries of the gangs. The Five Points, with fifteen hundred on its puissant muster rolls, was supreme--he said--between Broadway and the Bowery, Fourteenth Street and City Hall Park. The Eastmans, with one thousand warriors, flourished between Monroe and Fourteenth Streets, the Bowery and the East River. The Gas House Gang, with only two hundred in its nose count, was at home along Third Avenue between Eleventh and Eighteenth Streets. The vivacious Gophers were altogether heroes of the West Side. They numbered full five hundred, each a holy terror, and ranged the region bounded by Seventh Avenue, Fourteenth Street, Tenth Avenue and Forty-second Street. The Gophers owned a rock-bottom fame for their fighting qualities, and, speaking in the sense militant, neither the Eastmans nor the Five Points would care to mingle with them on slighter terms than two to one. The fulness of Whitey Dutch, himself of the Five Points, in what justice he did the Gophers, marked his splendid breadth of soul. Ike the Blood, overhung by some cloud of moodiness, devoted himself moderately to beer, taking little or less part in the talk. Evidently there was something bearing him down. “I ain't feelin' gay,” he remarked; “an' at that, if youse was to ast me, I couldn't tell youse why.” As though a thought had been suggested, he arose and started for the door. “I won't be away ten minutes,” he said.