The incident might have helped in building up for Louie a reputation, had it not been that all that was starkly heroic therein melted when, two days later, the ravished $380 was privily restored to Valenski, with the assurance that the entire business was a jest. Valenski knew nothing humorous had been intended, and that his bundle was returned in deference only to the orders of one high in politics and power. Also, it was the common feeling, a feeling no less cogent for not being put into words, that had Louie been of the wood from which champions are carved, the $380 would never have come back. To refrain from some intended stick-up upon grave orders given, might mean no more than prudence and a right discipline. But to send back money, once in actual hand and when the risk and work of which it stood the harvest had been encountered and performed, was to fly in the face of gang ethics. An order to that effect, however eminent its source, should have been met with stony refusal. There was one tale which should go, perhaps, to the right side of the reputational ledger, as indicating that Louie had nerve. Crazy Charlie was found dead in the mouth of a passageway, which opened off Mulberry Street near the Bowery. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. No one of sense supposed Louie did that throat slashing. Crazy Charlie was a hop-head, without a dollar in his jeans, and Louie never did anything except for money. He would no more have gone about a profitless killing, than he would have wasted time and effort by fishing in a bathtub. For all that, on the whispered hint of the Ghost--who himself was killed finally as a snitch--two plain-clothes men from the Eldridge Street station grabbed Louie. They did not tell him the reason of the pinch. Neither did they spread it on the books. The police have a habit of protecting themselves from the consequences of a foolish collar by a specious system of concealment, and put nothing on the blotter until sure. When searched at the desk, Louie's guns were discovered. Also, from inside his waistcoat was taken a seven-inch knife, which, as said the police sergeant, might have slit the windpipe of Crazy Charlie or any other bug. But, as anyone with eyes might see, the knife was as purely virginal as when it came from a final emery wheel in its far-off Sheffield home. It had slit nothing. Still, those plain-clothes dicks did not despair. They hoped to startle Louie into a confession. With a view to his moral and physical stampede, they conveyed Louie in a closed patrol wagon, at mirk midnight, to the morgue. He hadn't been told what he was charged with; he didn't know where he was going.