Word: birger
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There had been another battle down in Little Egypt,± and of all the places for a good machine-gun-spattering, bomb-throwing fight there was none better, than the late "Shady Rest." Not far from Herrin, Ill., it was the pastoral citadel of Charles Birger, bootlegger, gunman, gang chieftain. Carl Shelton, whose profession is the same as Mr. Birger's, had set out to get Mr. Birger. The ruins and the four dead bodies were the result. But Messrs. Birger and Shelton are still alive and plotting. Perhaps, they will really get one another some day. Their attempts...
...looked down, and there was the hand. It did not move. The Negro did. A sheriff who discerned something more than fantasy behind his terrified eyes and whirling words, followed the boy back to the river and found, under the hand, the body of a onetime bartender for Mr. Birger, wrapped in a horse-blanket and riddled with bullets. The sheriff was bothered, because at dawn that same morning he had been called out to have a look at one William B. McQuay who lay in his automobile three miles north of Herrin on the road to Johnson City. Sixteen...
...newspaperman went up the hill to Mr. Birger's roadhouse, a stark oblong building on the edge of some woods. A sign, needing paint, swung over the porch. It said "Shady Rest." The interviewer found Mr. Birger in the cellar, playing with a white dog. He had on a bullet-proof jacket. Six men sat around, spitting and smoking and laughing at the puppy. They all had rifles. Outside in the shed was an armored touring car that Charles Birger used when he drove abroad on his affairs. The roadhouse .was barricaded. Machine guns looked out between the shutters...
...gangs had originally been one, a compact body organized against the Ku Klux Klan to protect the interests of the Herrin liquor trade. Carl Shelton and Charles Birger disagreed about something-a holdup, a woman, a rake-off-nobody was sure. Mr. Shelton had an armored car made in St..Louis and hired a squad of gunmen to go round with him. Mr. Birger got his own friends together. It was hard to say who would...
...newspaperman wondered about these things as he walked down the hill. That night the people of Herrin wondered too, hearing the woodeny familiar rattle of machine-guns nearby, seeing a glow like a petal in the sky over Birger's "Shady Rest." Carl Shelton had tried an attack. His followers, with their caps pulled down and revolvers in each hand, stalked through woods blazing with electric light toward the roadhouse from whose windows jetted rods of blue flame. The attack failed. Carl Shelton said he would get Charles Birger...