The Disgraced Newsie: Part 2( Rewritten)

Chapter 9: David Jacobs' POV

Jack better get out of that Lodging House before one of the boys come back home and catch him. Who knows what they will do to him if they find him there.

"Walking Mouth. I need to talk to you right now". I headed toward my selling spot when I heard someone call out that name. Walking Mouth? No-one has ever called me that name since the strike ended. Well, besides Jack, but he only called me that when he was joking around with me. Wait, doesn't Spot Conlon call me by name as well? I hesitantly turned around and saw Spot Conlon walking toward me. What could he possibly want with me?

"What do you want?"

"I know that Jack Kelly is staying at your apartment and don't bother lying about it! My second-in-command overheard him at the train station talking about with the crip and one of his younger boys and he wouldn't lie about it to me"

"Why does it matter? Why can't you all just leave him alone?! Don't you all think that he already feels bad enough about his rally speech? Or that maybe he was forced into saying it? Let it go! We won the strike and there is no reason to hunt him down and hurt him again! He has been through enough!"

"So, you believe all of those stories too? Believe or not, I didn't want to hunt down Kelly because I wanted to hurt him"

"Really?"

"No. As a newsie leader myself, I can understand that sometimes you have do things that you don't like in order to protect your newsie brothers. Kelly may have been an idiot with that speech of his, but I know him; he wouldn't say something like that unless it was to protect his newsies. Most of the other leaders agreed as well, so I never wanted to hurt him. I just wanted to help him, so did most of the other leaders"

"So, you wanted to hunt him down to protect him from the other boys?"

"No, I wanted to hunt him down to protect him from Harlem! You of all people should know about the situation with Harlem". Yeah, those Harlem newsies. Jack always complained about them before he left.

"I know"

"I knew that those bastards would capture Kelly and use him as a hostage, so that Manhattan would be given up to them, but the problem was that I was worried that the Manhattan boys wouldn't care that much about Kelly and just leave him there, so the Harlem newsies would just kill him, and even I think that would be too far"

"So, you just wanted to protect him? So, you do care about Jack". And all of those times where he said otherwise. He really does care about him.

"Hey! It was only going to be a one time thing for him! After that, he was on his own!"

"What about the others?"

"What about them? I was just going to help Kelly, not anyone else! None of the other leaders are going to help them either. The only nice thing that we are going to do for them is take in some of the younger ones if Manhattan was taken over, but after that, they are on their own!"

"Ok, that makes some sense, but back to Jack. So, you teamed up with the others to look for him in Manhattan, why would you do that if you wanted to help him?"

"Because all of the leaders who wanted to help Kelly couldn't find him on their turfs and I couldn't find him, so I assumed that he was still in Manhattan. I was just going to send some of my boys in Manhattan anyways to look for him without having the Manhattan newsies find out, but news travels fast in New York and they found out. Higgins even sent that bird-named newsie of his- -"

"Finch?"

"To talk to me and they would allow me to send some of my boys to look for him in Manhattan, along with their search parties. I didn't want to agree to it because I thought that it would scare Kelly off, but I thought it would cover more ground and I just had to make sure that none of the Manhattaners found him before my boys did"

"Ok, so what does this have to do with me?"

"Like I said, I know that he is at your place, so I need you to take me there, so I could invite him to Brooklyn. He will be more safer there anyways. I will make sure of it"

"What about Crutchie? And Jojo? Jack won't leave without them"

"Then I guess that they can come too, but no-one else after that"

"Fine, let's go then". Not the best circumstances that I would ever imagine Jack to be in, but he will be safe and that is all that matters.