Down by the Docks- Or, How Spot Conlon came to be King of Brooklyn, as told by his closest friends- the Brooklyn newsies.

Part One: Seabutch

"It's a barque."

"Betcha not."

Spot Conlon sent a glob of saliva into the waters of the bay and regarded the ship far out on the horizon with his usual steely glare.

"Barque."

I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to start a beef with Spot Conlon, King of Brooklyn. He was one of my closest friends, almost a brother, a hero to me, the most powerful and respected newsie in New York, the person I had to thank for giving me a leg up in the cutthroat world of New York's slums. But now was not the best time to win a few of his best shooters based on a slight difference in boat rigs. Never mind I was the expert.

Best to let sleeping dogs lie.

Spot leaned a bit forward on his shipping-crate throne, staring Southwest down the busy shipping lane.

"You was right, Butch. She's a brigantine."

I grunted in acknowledgement.

"It's only fair that I pays ya." And he flipped a pair of choice shooters my way.

I snatched them out of the air and offered them on opened palm back to Spot.

"Naw, the angle was wrong. You keep 'em."

"I don't-" Spot was about to launch into one of his lectures, a lecture on the honorable thing to do, when something over my shoulder distracted him.

I turned slowly, looking down the slope of the shipping crate mountain that served as Brooklyn headquarters. I looked down the length of the dock, at the tanned bodies of Spot's best and brightest (not to mention biggest and baddest) personal cohort of newsie followers swimming in the briny depths of the bay. I looked out to where the boards of the dock met the cobbles of Gold Street (which was not, in fact, gold). And there, I saw his target.

A girl. Couldn't tell how she looked from a distance, but her swinging skirt was all Spot needed to see to hand me his cane, leap from the crates, and go swaggering off in the direction of Gold Street. One lucky lady was about to be wooed by the King of Brooklyn himself.

She was the seventh that day.

I sighed, plopped myself down on a crate, and laid the can across my lap. Here I was again, holding down the fort, holding the cane (rumored by the more superstitious types to hold all of Brooklyn's power- they say Spot sold his gall bladder to the devil, or the ghost of Boss Tweed, for it) across my lap and wondering for the umpteenth time how a kid no taller than my elbow got to run the newsboy underworld with so little effort, you'd think he was born to do it.

Well, I guess I had the answer. We all knew. As I looked at the boys on the dock, diving into the water and clambering back out, it struck me that most of us would. Spot Conlon knew a thing or two about choosing his friends and keeping them close.

He kept his enemies closer still

As the summer sun and sea breeze pulled a blanket over my shoulders, I slipped back in time, to sometime not so very long ago, the day when I first met Spot Conlon.

.

.

.

.

.

I had been no more than twenty-four hours off a transcontinental train and was still shaking cinders from my overgrown hair. I was on solid land for one of the first times in the past seven years and still reeling from the stillness that sat under my feet.

But New York was never still, and here I was, lost and utterly alone.

Being raised to take the pitch and roll of a clipper in stride, I wasn't particularly disconcerted. In the last two weeks, my father had been swept out into the sea, and I had been unceremoniously marooned at the nearest port. From there I did the only sensible thing- I wrote a note to Mam, mailed it, and used the small sack of dollars Pa had kept in his seabag to buy me a ticket East. A couple thousand miles of close quarters and chugging locomotion later, I was standing on the corner of Broadway, with nothing to my name (which happened to be Brendan Patrick Clement Murphy Lynch) but a sea bag the size of my head, the clothes on my back, and the cob pipe in my mouth that I had filched from Pa's possessions before the rest of the crew had taken their shares.

There were only two things running through my head.

First was the moment Pa had gone; one minute he was up in the head rig, like always laughing into the teeth of a gale, straddling the bowsprit and lashing a jib in.

The next, a rogue wave met us from head-on. A wall of foam and a roar; when the Fair Winifred dashed back down, father was gone. The jib, however, was lashed in with perfect form.

The second thought: I needed a smoke.

However, my last match had been used up somewhere around Pike's Peak, and I was clean out of tinder.

So I just stood there on Broadway, eleven years old and all alone, a cold pipe sticking out of my mouth.

"Hey kid!"

I looked around.

"'Ey! Over here!"

I looked behind me to see a boy about my age emerging from an alley.

"Hey kid. You need a light?"

"Aye."

And the boy pulled a paper book of matches from a pocket.

.

.

.

That boy was Spot Conlon, and ever since that moment, we'd been friends.

So that's one little story, but trust me the rest will be much more informative. Do Read and Review! I'll love you forever.