Beadle's Pocket Library No. 5

# The Two Detectives: Fortunes of a Bowery Girl

Albert W. Aiken's serialized story opens in "The Dive," a basement saloon on the Bowery. A sixteen-year-old girl defies her employer Giacomo ("Jocky"), an Italian proprietor, refusing his demand that she steal from pedestrians. Despite her street orphanage and years of labor selling shoe-strings and buttons, she resists theft. When Jocky threatens violence, she strikes him and he draws a knife. The narrative then shifts to a brown-stone mansion on East Thirty-first Street, where wealthy retired merchant Obadiah Oltkoff confronts his feeble nephew Algernon over mounting debts—a tailor's bill of two hundred and ten dollars being the latest. Oltkoff, having paid Algernon's debts three times previously, announces this will be the final payment, hinting his nephew cannot expect to inherit his considerable fortune.