to tell you. Allow me to congratulate you on your good fortune."

The beneficiary rose to his feet, seeming not to see the hand the old
Judge had extended across the desktop toward him. On his face, of a
sudden, was a queer, eager look. It was as though he foresaw the coming
true of long-cherished and heretofore unattainable visions.

"Have you got it here, suh?"

He glanced about him as though expecting to see a bulky bundle. Judge
Priest smiled.

"Oh, no; they didn't send it along with the letter--that wouldn't be
regular. There's quite a lot of things to be done fust. There'll be some
proofs to be got up and sworn to before a man called a British consul;
and likely there'll be a lot of papers that you'll have to sign; and
then all the papers and the proofs and things will be sent acrost the
ocean. And, after some fees are paid out over there--why, then you'll
git your inheritance."

The rapt look faded from the strained face, leaving it downcast. "I'm
afeared, then, I won't be able to claim that there money," he said
forlornly.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't know how to sign my own name. Raised the way I was, I
never got no book learnin'. I can't neither read nor write."

Compassion shadowed the Judge's chubby face; and compassion was in his
voice as he made answer:

"You don't need to worry about that part of it. You can make your
mark--just a cross mark on the paper, with witnesses present--like
this."

He took up a pen, dipped it in the ink-well and illustrated his meaning.

"Yes, suh; I'm glad it kin be done thataway. I always wisht I knowed how
to read big print and spell my own name out. I ast a feller oncet to
write my name out fur me in plain letters on a piece of paper. I was
aimin' to learn to copy it off; but I showed it to one of the hands at
the liver' stable and he busted out laughin'. And then I come to find
out this here feller had tricked me fur to make game of me. He hadn't
wrote my name out a-tall--he'd wrote some dirty words instid. So after
that I give up tryin' to educate myself. That was several years back and
I ain't tried sence. Now I reckin I'm too old to learn. . . . I wonder,
suh--I wonder ef it'll be very long before that there money gits here
and I begin to have the spendin' of it?"

"Makin' plans already?"

"Yes, suh," O'Day answered truthfully; "I am." He was silent for a
moment, his eyes on the floor; then timidly he advanced the thought that
had come to him: "I reckin, suh, it wouldn't be no more'n fair and
proper ef I divided my money with you to pay you back fur all this
trouble you're fixin' to take on my account. Would--would half of it be
enough? The other half oughter last me fur whut uses I'll make of it."

"I know you mean well and I'm much obliged to you fur your offer,"
stated Judge Priest, smiling a little; "but it wouldn't be fittin' or
proper fur me to tech a cent of your money. There'll be some court dues
and some lawyers' fees, and sech, to pay over there in Ireland; but
after that's settled up everything comes direct to you. It's goin' to be
a pleasure to me to help you arrange these here details that you don't
understand--a pleasure and not a burden."

He considered the figure before him.

"Now here's another thing, Peep: I judge it's hardly fittin' fur a man
of substance to go on livin' the way you've had to live durin' your
life. Ef you don't mind my offerin' you a little advice I would suggest
that you go right down to Felsburg Brothers when you leave here and git
yourself fitted out with some suitable clothin'. And you'd better go to
Max Biederman's, too, and order a better pair of shoes fur yourself
than them you've got on. Tell 'em I sent you and that I guarantee the
payment of your bills. Though I reckin that'll hardly be necessary--when
the news of your good luck gits noised round I misdoubt whether there's
any firm in our entire city that wouldn't be glad to have you on their
books fur a stiddy customer.

"And, also, ef I was you I'd arrange to git me regular board and
lodgin's somewheres round town. You see, Peep, comin' into a property
entails consider'ble many responsibilities right frum the start."

"Yes, suh," assented the legatee obediently. "I'll do jest ez you say,
Judge Priest, about the clothes and the shoes, and all that; but--but,
ef you don't mind, I'd like to go on livin' at Gafford's. Pete Gafford's
been mighty good to me--him and his wife both; and I wouldn't like fur
'em to think I was gittin' stuck up jest because I've had this here
streak of luck come to me. Mebbe, seein' ez how things has changed with
me, they'd be willin' to take me in fur a table boarder at their house;
but I shorely would hate to give up livin' in that there little room
behind the feed room at the liver' stable. I don't know ez I could ever
find any place that would seem ez homelike to me ez whut it is."

"Suit yourself about that," said Judge Priest heartily. "I don't know
but whut you've got the proper notion about it after all."

"Yes, suh. Them Gaffords have been purty nigh the only real true
friends I ever had that I could count on." He hesitated a moment. "I
reckin--I reckin, suh, it'll be a right smart while, won't it, before
that money gits here frum all the way acrost the ocean?"

"Why, yes; I imagine it will. Was you figurin' on investin' a little of
it now?"

"Yes, suh; I was."

"About how much did you think of spendin' fur a beginnin'?"

O'Day squinted his eyes, his lips moving in silent calculation.

"Well, suh," he said at length, "I could use ez much ez a silver dollar.
But, of course, sence----"

"That sounds kind of moderate to me," broke in Judge Priest. He shoved a
pudgy hand into a pocket of his white trousers. "I reckin this detail
kin be arranged. Here, Peep"--he extended his hand--"here's your
dollar." Then, as the other drew back, stammering a refusal, he hastily
added: "No, no, no; go ahead and take it--it's yours. I'm jest advancin'
it to you out of whut'll be comin' to you shortly.

"I'll tell you whut: Until sech time ez you are in position to draw on
your own funds you jest drap in here to see me when you're in need of
cash, and I'll try to let you have whut you require--in reason. I'll
keep a proper reckinin' of whut you git and you kin pay me back ez soon
ez your inheritance is put into your hands.

"One thing more," he added as the heir, having thanked him, was making
his grateful adieu at the threshold: "Now that you're wealthy, or about
to be so, I kind of imagine quite a passel of fellers will suddenly
discover themselves strangely and affectionately drawed toward you.
You're liable to find out you've always had more true and devoted
friends in this community than whut you ever imagined to be the case
before.

"Now friendship is a mighty fine thing, takin' it by and large; but it
kin be overdone. It's barely possible that some of this here new crop of
your well-wishers and admirers will be makin' little business
propositions to you--desirin' to have you go partners with 'em in
business, or to sell you desirable pieces of real estate; or even to let
you loan 'em various sums of money. I wouldn't be surprised but whut a
number of sech chances will be comin' your way durin' the next few days,
and frum then on. Ef sech should be the case I would suggest to you
that, before committin' yourself to anybody or anything, you tell 'em
that I'm sort of actin' as your unofficial adviser in money matters, and
that they should come to me and outline their little schemes in person.
Do you git my general drift?"

"Yes, suh," said Peep. "I won't furgit; and thank you ag'in, Judge,
specially fur lettin' me have this dollar ahead of time."

He shambled out with the coin in his hand; and on his face was again
the look of one who sees before him the immediate fulfillment of a
delectable dream.

With lines of sympathy and amusement crisscrossing at the outer corners
of his eyelids, Judge Priest, rising and stepping to his door, watched
the retreating figure of the town's newest and strangest capitalist
disappear down the wide front steps of the courthouse.

Presently he went back to his chair and sat down, tugging at his short
chin beard.

"I wonder, now," said he, meditatively addressing the emptiness of the
room, "I wonder whut a man sixty-odd-year old is goin' to do with the
fust whole dollar he ever had in his life!"

It was characteristic of our circuit judge that he should have voiced
his curiosity aloud. Talking to himself when he was alone was one of his
habits. Also, it was characteristic of him that he had refrained from
betraying his inquisitiveness to his late caller. Similar motives of
delicacy had kept him from following the other man to watch the
sequence.

However, at secondhand, the details very shortly reached him. They were
brought by no less a person than Deputy Sheriff Quarles, who, some
twenty minutes or possibly half an hour later, obtruded himself upon
Judge Priest's presence.

"Judge," began Mr. Quarles, "you'd never in the world guess whut Old
Peep O'Day done with the first piece of money he got his hands on out
of that there forty thousand pounds of silver dollars he's come into
frum his uncle's estate."

The old man slanted a keen glance in Mr. Quarles' direction.

"Tell me, son," he asked softly, "how did you come to hear the glad
tidin's so promptly?"

"Me?" said Mr. Quarles innocently. "Why, Judge Priest, the word is all
over this part of town by this time. Why, I reckin twenty-five or fifty
people must 'a' been watchin' Old Peep to see how he was goin' to act
when he come out of this courthouse."

"Well, well, well!" murmured the Judge blandly. "Good news travels
almost ez fast sometimes ez whut bad news does--don't it, now? Well,
son, I give up the riddle. Tell me jest whut our elderly friend did do
with the first installment of his inheritance."

"Well, suh, he turned south here at the gate and went down the street,
a-lookin' neither to the right nor the left. He looked to me like a man
in a trance, almost. He keeps right on through Legal Row till he comes
to Franklin Street, and then he goes up Franklin to B. Weil & Son's
confectionary store; and there he turns in. I happened to be followin'
'long behind him, with a few others--with several others, in fact--and
we-all sort of slowed up in passin' and looked in at the door; and
that's how I come to be in a position to see whut happened.

"Old Peep, he marches in jest like I'm tellin' it to you, suh; and Mr.
B. Weil comes to wait on him, and he starts in buyin'. He buys hisself a
five-cent bag of gumdrops; and a five-cent bag of jelly beans; and a
ten-cent bag of mixed candies--kisses and candy mottoes, and sech ez
them, you know; and a sack of fresh roasted peanuts--a big sack, it was,
fifteen-cent size; and two prize boxes; and some gingersnaps--ten cents'
worth; and a coconut; and half a dozen red bananas; and half a dozen
more of the plain yaller ones. Altogether I figger he spent a even
dollar; in fact, I seen him hand Mr. Weil a dollar, and I didn't see him
gittin' no change back out of it.

"Then he comes on out of the store, with all these things stuck in his
pockets and stacked up in his arms till he looks sort of like some new
kind of a summertime Santy Klaws; and he sets down on a goods box at the
edge of the pavement, with his feet in the gutter, and starts in eatin'
all them things.

"First, he takes a bite off a yaller banana and then off a red banana,
and then a mouthful of peanuts; and then maybe some mixed candies--not
sayin' a word to nobody, but jest natchelly eatin' his fool head off. A
young chap that's clerkin' in Bagby's grocery, next door, steps up to
him and speaks to him, meanin', I suppose, to ast him is it true he's
wealthy. And Old Peep says to him, 'Please don't come botherin' me now,
sonny--I'm busy ketchin' up,' he says; and keeps right on a-munchin'
and a-chewin' like all possessed.

"That ain't all of it, neither, Judge--not by a long shot it ain't!
Purty soon Old Peep looks round him at the little crowd that's gathered.
He didn't seem to pay no heed to the grown-up people standin' there; but
he sees a couple of boys about ten years old in the crowd, and he
beckons to them to come to him, and he makes room fur them alongside him
on the box and divides up his knick-knacks with them.

"When I left there to come on back here he had no less'n six kids
squatted round him, includin' one little nigger boy; and between 'em all
they'd jest finished up the last of the bananas and peanuts and the
candy and the gingersnaps, and was fixin' to take turns drinkin' the
milk out of the coconut. I s'pose they've got it all cracked out of the
shell and et up by now--the coconut, I mean. Judge, you oughter stepped
down into Franklin Street and taken a look at the picture whilst there
was still time. You never seen sech a funny sight in all your days, I'll
bet!"

"I reckin 'twould be too late to be startin' now," said Judge Priest.
"I'm right sorry I missed it. . . . Busy ketchin' up, huh? Yes; I reckin he
is. . . . Tell me, son, whut did you make out of the way Peep O'Day acted?"

"Why, suh," stated Mr. Quarles, "to my mind, Judge, there ain't no
manner of doubt but whut prosperity has went to his head and turned it.
He acted to me like a plum' distracted idiot. A grown man with forty
thousand pounds of solid money settin' on the side of a gutter eatin'
jimcracks with a passel of dirty little boys! Kin you figure it out any
other way, Judge--except that his mind is gone?"

"I don't set myself up to be a specialist in mental disorders, son,"
said Judge Priest softly; "but, sence you ask me the question, I should
say, speakin' offhand, that it looks to me more ez ef the heart was the
organ that was mainly affected. And possibly"--he added this last with a
dry little smile--"and possibly, by now, the stomach also."

Whether or not Mr. Quarles was correct in his psychopathic diagnosis, he
certainly had been right when he told Judge Priest that the word was
already all over the business district. It had spread fast and was still
spreading; it spread to beat the wireless, travelling as it did by that
mouth-to-ear method of communication which is so amazingly swift and
generally as tremendously incorrect. Persons who could not credit the
tale at all, nevertheless lost no time in giving to it a yet wider
circulation; so that, as though borne on the wind, it moved in every
direction, like ripples on a pond; and with each time of retelling the
size of the legacy grew.

The _Daily Evening News_, appearing on the streets at 5 P. M., confirmed
the tale; though by its account the fortune was reduced to a sum far
below the gorgeously exaggerated estimates of most of the earlier
narrators. Between breakfast and supper-time Peep O'Day's position in
the common estimation of his fellow citizens underwent a radical and
revolutionary change. He ceased--automatically, as it were--to be a town
character; he became, by universal consent, a town notable, whose every
act and every word would thereafter be subjected to close scrutiny and
closer analysis.

The next morning the nation at large had opportunity to know of the
great good fortune that had befallen Paul Felix O'Day, for the story had
been wired to the city papers by the local correspondents of the same;
and the press associations had picked up a stickful of the story and
sped it broadcast over leased wires. Many who until that day had never
heard of the fortunate man, or, indeed, of the place where he lived, at
once manifested a concern in his well-being.

Certain firms of investment brokers in New York and Chicago promptly
added a new name to what vulgarly they called their "sucker" lists.
Dealers in mining stocks, in oil stocks, in all kinds of attractive
stocks, showed interest; in circular form samples of the most optimistic
and alluring literature the world has ever known were consigned to the
post, addressed to Mr. P. F. O'Day, such-and-such a town, such-and-such
a state, care of general delivery.

Various lonesome ladies in various lonesome places lost no time in
sitting themselves down and inditing congratulatory letters; object
matrimony. Some of these were single ladies; others had been widowed,
either by death or request. Various other persons of both sexes,
residing here, there and elsewhere in our country, suddenly remembered
that they, too, were descended from the O'Days of Ireland, and wrote on
forthwith to claim proud and fond relationship with the particular O'Day
who had come into money.

It was a remarkable circumstance, which instantly developed, that one
man should have so many distant cousins scattered over the Union, and a
thing equally noteworthy that practically all these kinspeople, through
no fault of their own, should at the present moment be in such
straitened circumstances and in such dire need of temporary assistance
of a financial nature. Ticker and printer's ink, operating in
conjunction, certainly did their work mighty well; even so, several days
were to elapse before the news reached one who, of all those who read
it, had most cause to feel a profound personal sensation in the
intelligence.

This delay, however, was nowise to be blamed upon the tardiness of the
newspapers; it was occasioned by the fact that the person referred to
was for the moment well out of touch with the active currents of world
affairs, he being confined in a workhouse at Evansville, Indiana.

As soon as he had rallied from the shock this individual set about
making plans to put himself in direct touch with the inheritor. He had
ample time in which to frame and shape his campaign, inasmuch as there
remained for him yet to serve nearly eight long and painfully tedious
weeks of a three-months' vagrancy sentence. Unlike most of those now
manifesting their interest, he did not write a letter; but he dreamed
dreams that made him forget the annoyances of a ball and chain fast on
his ankle and piles of stubborn stones to be cracked up into fine bits
with a heavy hammer.

We are getting ahead of our narrative, though--days ahead of it. The
chronological sequence of events properly dates from the morning
following the morning when Peep O'Day, having been abruptly translated
from the masses of the penniless to the classes of the wealthy, had
forthwith embarked upon the gastronomic orgy so graphically detailed by
Deputy Sheriff Quarles.

On that next day more eyes probably than had been trained in Peep
O'Day's direction in all the unremarked and unremarkable days of his
life put together were focused upon him. Persons who theretofore had
regarded his existence--if indeed they gave it a thought--as one of the
utterly trivial and inconsequential incidents of the cosmic scheme, were
moved to speak to him, to clasp his hand, and, in numerous instances, to
express a hearty satisfaction over his altered circumstances. To all
these, whether they were moved by mere neighbourly good will, or
perchance were inspired by impulses of selfishness, the old man
exhibited a mien of aloofness and embarrassment.

This diffidence or this suspicion--or this whatever it was--protected
him from those who might entertain covetous and ulterior designs upon
his inheritance even better than though he had been brusque and rude;
while those who sought to question him regarding his plans for the
future drew from him only mumbled and evasive replies, which left them
as deeply in the dark as they had been before. Altogether, in his
intercourse with adults he appeared shy and very ill at ease.

It was noted, though, that early in the forenoon he attached to him
perhaps half a dozen urchins, of whom the oldest could scarcely have
been more than twelve or thirteen years of age; and that these
youngsters remained his companions throughout the day. Likewise the
events of that day were such as to confirm a majority of the observers
in practically the same belief that had been voiced by Mr.
Quarles--namely, that whatever scanty brains Peep O'Day might have ever
had were now completely ruined by the stroke of luck that had befallen
him.

In fairness to all--to O'Day and to the town critics who sat in judgment
upon his behaviour--it should be stated that his conduct at the very
outset was not entirely devoid of evidences of sanity. With his troupe
of ragged juveniles trailing behind him, he first visited Felsburg
Brothers' Emporium to exchange his old and disreputable costume for a
wardrobe that, in accordance with Judge Priest's recommendation, he had
ordered on the afternoon previous, and which had since been undergoing
certain necessary alterations.

With his meagre frame incased in new black woollens, and wearing, as an
incongruous added touch, the most brilliant of neckties, a necktie of
the shade of a pomegranate blossom, he presently issued from Felsburg
Brothers' and entered M. Biederman's shoe store, two doors below. Here
Mr. Biederman fitted him with shoes, and in addition noted down a
further order, which the purchaser did not give until after he had
conferred earnestly with the members of his youthful entourage.

Those watching this scene from a distance saw--and perhaps marvelled at
the sight--that already, between these small boys, on the one part, and
this old man, on the other, a perfect understanding appeared to have
been established.

After leaving Biederman's, and tagged by his small escorts, O'Day went
straight to the courthouse and, upon knocking at the door, was admitted
to Judge Priest's private chambers, the boys meantime waiting outside in
the hall. When he came forth he showed them something he held in his
hand and told them something; whereupon all of them burst into excited
and joyous whoops.

It was at that point that O'Day, by the common verdict of most grown-up
onlookers, began to betray the vagaries of a disordered intellect. Not
that his reason had not been under suspicion already, as a result of his
freakish excess in the matter of B. Weil & Son's wares on the preceding
day; but the relapse that now followed, as nearly everybody agreed, was
even more pronounced, even more symptomatic than the earlier attack of
aberration.

In brief, this was what happened: To begin with, Mr. Virgil Overall, who
dealt in lands and houses and sold insurance of all the commoner
varieties on the side, had stalked O'Day to this point and was lying in
wait for him as he came out of the courthouse into the Public Square,
being anxious to describe to him some especially desirable bargains, in
both improved and unimproved realty; also, Mr. Overall was prepared to
book him for life, accident and health policies on the spot.

So pleased was Mr. Overall at having distanced his professional rivals
in the hunt that he dribbled at the mouth. But the warmth of his
disappointment and indignation dried up the salivary founts instantly
when the prospective patron declined to listen to him at all and,
breaking free from Mr. Overall's detaining clasp, hurried on into Legal
Row, with his small convoys trotting along ahead and alongside him.

At the door of the Blue Goose Saloon and Short Order Restaurant its
proprietor, by name Link Iserman, was lurking, as it were, in ambush. He
hailed the approaching O'Day most cordially; he inquired in a warm voice
regarding O'Day's health; and then, with a rare burst of generosity, he
invited, nay urged, O'Day to step inside and have something on the
house--wines, ales, liquors or cigars; it was all one to Mr. Iserman.
The other merely shook his head and, without a word of thanks for the
offer, passed on as though bent upon an important mission.

Mark how the proofs were accumulating: The man had disdained the company
of men of approximately his own age or thereabout; he had refused an
opportunity to partake of refreshment suitable to his years; and now he
stepped into the Bon Ton toy store and bought for cash--most
inconceivable of acquisitions!--a little wagon that was painted bright
red and bore on its sides, in curlicued letters, the name Comet.

His next stop was made at Bishop & Bryan's grocery, where, with the aid
of his youthful compatriots, he first discriminatingly selected, and
then purchased on credit, and finally loaded into the wagon, such
purchases as a dozen bottles of soda pop, assorted flavours; cheese,
crackers--soda and animal; sponge cakes with weather-proof pink icing on
them; fruits of the season; cove oysters; a bottle of pepper sauce; and
a quantity of the extra large sized bright green cucumber pickles known
to the trade as the Fancy Jumbo Brand, Prime Selected.

Presently the astounding spectacle was presented of two small boys, with
string bridles on their arms, drawing the wagon through our town and out
of it into the country, with Peep O'Day in the rôle of teamster walking
alongside the laden wagon. He was holding the lines in his hands and
shouting orders at his team, who showed a colty inclination to shy at
objects, to kick up their heels without provocation, and at intervals to
try to run away. Eight or ten small boys--for by now the troupe had
grown in number and in volume of noise--trailed along, keeping step with
their elderly patron and advising him shrilly regarding the management
of his refractory span.

As it turned out, the destination of this preposterous procession was
Bradshaw's Grove, where the entire party spent the day picnicking in the
woods and, as reported by several reliable witnesses, playing games. It
was not so strange that holidaying boys should play games; the amazing
feature of the performance was that Peep O'Day, a man old enough to be
grandfather to any of them, played with them, being by turns an Indian
chief, a robber baron, and the driver of a stagecoach attacked by Wild
Western desperadoes.

When he returned to town at dusk, drawing his little red wagon behind
him, his new suit was rumpled into many wrinkles and marked by dust and
grass stains; his flame-coloured tie was twisted under one ear; his new
straw hat was mashed quite out of shape; and in his eyes was a light
that sundry citizens, on meeting him, could only interpret to be a spark
struck from inner fires of madness.

Days that came after this, on through the midsummer, were, with
variations, but repetitions of the day I have just described. Each
morning Peep O'Day would go to either the courthouse or Judge Priest's
home to turn over to the Judge the unopened mail which had been
delivered to him at Gafford's stables; then he would secure from the
Judge a loan of money against his inheritance. Generally the amount of
his daily borrowing was a dollar; rarely was it so much as two dollars;
and only once was it more than two dollars.

By nightfall the sum would have been expended upon perfectly useless and
absolutely childish devices. It might be that he would buy toy pistols
and paper caps for himself and his following of urchins; or that his
whim would lead him to expend all the money in tin flutes. In one case
the group he so incongruously headed would be for that one day a gang of
make-believe banditti; in another, they would constitute themselves a
fife-and-drum corps--with barreltops for the drums--and would march
through the streets, where scandalised adults stood in their tracks to
watch them go by, they all the while making weird sounds, which with
them passed for music.

Or again, the available cash resources would be invested in provender;
and then there would be an outing in the woods. Under Peep O'Day's
captaincy his chosen band of youngsters picked dewberries; they went
swimming together in Guthrie's Gravel Pit, out by the old Fair Grounds,
where his spare naked shanks contrasted strongly with their plump
freckled legs as all of them splashed through the shallows, making for
deep water. Under his leadership they stole watermelons from Mr. Dick
Bell's patch, afterward eating their spoils in thickets of grapevines
along the banks of Perkins' Creek.

It was felt that mental befuddlement and mortal folly could reach no
greater heights--or no lower depths--than on a certain hour of a certain
day, along toward the end of August, when O'Day came forth from his
quarters in Gafford's stables, wearing a pair of boots that M.
Biederman's establishment had turned out to his order and his
measure--not such boots as a sensible man might be expected to wear, but
boots that were exaggerated and monstrous counterfeits of the
red-topped, scroll-fronted, brass-toed, stub-heeled, squeaky-soled
bootees that small boys of an earlier generation possessed.

Very proudly and seemingly unconscious of or, at least, oblivious to the
derisive remarks that the appearance of these new belongings drew from
many persons, the owner went clumping about in them, with the rumply
legs of his trousers tucked down in them, and ballooning up and out over
the tops in folds which overlapped from his knee joints halfway down his
attenuated calves.

As Deputy Sheriff Quarles said, the combination was a sight fit to make
a horse laugh. It may be that small boys have a lesser sense of humour
than horses have, for certainly the boys who were the old man's
invariable shadows did not laugh at him, or at his boots either.

Between the whiskered senior and his small comrades there existed a
freemasonry that made them all sense a thing beyond the ken of most of
their elders. Perhaps this was because the elders, being blind in their
superior wisdom, saw neither this thing nor the communion that
flourished. They saw only the farcical joke. But His Honour, Judge
Priest, to cite a conspicuous exception, seemed not to see the
lamentable comedy of it.

Indeed, it seemed to some almost as if Judge Priest were aiding and
abetting the befogged O'Day in his demented enterprises, his peculiar
excursions and his weird purchases. If he did not actually encourage him
in these constant exhibitions of witlessness, certainly there were no
evidences available to show that he sought to dissuade O'Day from his
strange course.

At the end of a fortnight one citizen, in whom patience had ceased to be
a virtue and to whose nature long-continued silence on any public topic
was intolerable, felt it his duty to speak to the Judge upon the
subject. This gentleman--his name was S. P. Escott--held, with others,
that, for the good name of the community, steps should be taken to abate
the infantile, futile activities of the besotted legatee.

Afterward Mr. Escott, giving a partial account of the conversation with
Judge Priest to certain of his friends, showed unfeigned annoyance at
the outcome.

"I claim that old man's not fittin' to be runnin' a court any longer,"
he stated bitterly. "He's too old and peevish--that's whut ails him! Fur
one, I'm certainly not never goin' to vote fur him again. Why, it's
gettin' to be ez much ez a man's life is worth to stop that there
spiteful old crank on the street and put a civil question to him--that's
whut's the matter!"

"What happened, S. P.?" inquired someone.

"Why, here's whut happened!" exclaimed the aggrieved Mr. Escott. "I
hadn't any more than started in to tell him the whole town was talkin'
about the way that daffy Old Peep O'Day was carryin' on, and that
somethin' had oughter be done about it, and didn't he think it was
beholdin' on him ez circuit judge to do somethin' right away, sech ez
havin' O'Day tuck up and tried fur a lunatic, and that I fur one was
ready and willin' to testify to the crazy things I'd seen done with my
own eyes--when he cut in on me and jest ez good ez told me to my own
face that ef I'd quit tendin' to other people's business I'd mebbe have
more business of my own to tend to.

"Think of that, gentlemen! A circuit judge bemeanin' a citizen and a
taxpayer"--he checked himself slightly--"anyhow, a citizen, thataway! It
shows he can't be rational his own self. Personally I claim Old Priest
is failin' mentally--he must be! And ef anybody kin be found to run
against him at the next election you gentlemen jest watch and see who
gits my vote!"

Having uttered this threat with deep and significant emphasis Mr.
Escott, still muttering, turned and entered the front gate of his
boarding house. It was not exactly his boarding house; his wife ran it.
But Mr. Escott lived there and voted from there.

But the apogee of Peep O'Day's carnival of weird vagaries of deportment
came at the end of two months--two months in which each day the man
furnished cumulative and piled-up material for derisive and jocular
comment on the part of a very considerable proportion of his fellow
townsmen.

Three occurrences of a widely dissimilar nature, yet all closely
interrelated to the main issue, marked the climax of the man's new rôle
in his new career. The first of these was the arrival of his legacy; the
second was a one-ring circus; and the third and last was a nephew.

In the form of certain bills of exchange the estate left by the late
Daniel O'Day, of the town of Kilmare, in the island of Ireland, was on a
certain afternoon delivered over into Judge Priest's hands, and by him,
in turn, handed to the rightful owner, after which sundry
indebtednesses, representing the total of the old Judge's day-to-day
cash advances to O'Day, were liquidated.

The ceremony of deducting this sum took place at the Planters' Bank,
whither the two had journeyed in company from the courthouse. Having,
with the aid of the paying teller, instructed O'Day in the technical
details requisite to the drawing of personal checks, Judge Priest went
home and had his bag packed, and left for Reelfoot Lake to spend a week
fishing. As a consequence he missed the remaining two events, following
immediately thereafter.

The circus was no great shakes of a circus; no grand, glittering,
gorgeous, glorious pageant of education and entertainment, travelling
on its own special trains; no vast tented city of world's wonders and
world's champions, heralded for weeks and weeks in advance of its coming
by dead walls emblazoned with the finest examples of the lithographer's
art, and by half-page advertisements in the _Daily Evening News_. On the
contrary, it was a shabby little wagon show, which, coming overland on
short notice, rolled into town under horse power, and set up its ragged
and dusty canvases on the vacant lot across from Yeiser's drug store.

Compared with the street parade of any of its great and famous rivals,
the street parade of this circus was a meagre and disappointing thing.
Why, there was only one elephant, a dwarfish and debilitated-looking
creature, worn mangy and slick on its various angles, like the cover of
an old-fashioned haircloth trunk; and obviously most of the closed cages
were weather-beaten stake wagons in disguise. Nevertheless, there was a
sizable turnout of people for the afternoon performance. After all, a
circus was a circus.

Moreover, this particular circus was marked at the afternoon performance
by happenings of a nature most decidedly unusual. At one o'clock the
doors were opened: at one-ten the eyes of the proprietor were made glad
and his heart was uplifted within him by the sight of a strange
procession, drawing nearer and nearer across the scuffed turf of the
common, and heading in the direction of the red ticket wagon.

At the head of the procession marched Peep O'Day--only, of course, the
proprietor didn't know it was Peep O'Day--a queer figure in his rumpled
black clothes and his red-topped brass-toed boots, and with one hand
holding fast to the string of a captive toy balloon. Behind him, in an
uneven jostling formation, followed many small boys and some small
girls. A census of the ranks would have developed that here were
included practically all the juvenile white population who otherwise,
through a lack of funds, would have been denied the opportunity to
patronise this circus or, in fact, any circus.

Each member of the joyous company was likewise the bearer of a toy
balloon--red, yellow, blue, green or purple, as the case might be. Over
the line of heads the taut rubbery globes rode on their tethers, nodding
and twisting like so many big iridescent bubbles; and half a block away,
at the edge of the lot, a balloon vender, whose entire stock had been
disposed of in one splendid transaction, now stood, empty-handed but
full-pocketed, marvelling at the stroke of luck that enabled him to take
an afternoon off and rest his voice.

Out of a seemingly bottomless exchequer Peep O'Day bought tickets of
admission for all. But this was only the beginning. Once inside the tent
he procured accommodations in the reserved-seat section for himself and
those who accompanied him. From such superior points of vantage the
whole crew of them witnessed the performance, from the thrilling grand
entry, with spangled ladies and gentlemen riding two by two on
broad-backed steeds, to the tumbling bout introducing the full strength
of the company, which came at the end.

They munched fresh-roasted peanuts and balls of sugar-coated pop corn,
slightly rancid, until they munched no longer with zest but merely
mechanically. They drank pink lemonade to an extent that threatened
absolute depletion of the fluid contents of both barrels in the
refreshment stand out in the menagerie tent. They whooped their
unbridled approval when the wild Indian chief, after shooting down a
stuffed coon with a bow and arrow from somewhere up near the top of the
centre pole while balancing himself jauntily erect upon the haunches of
a coursing white charger, suddenly flung off his feathered headdress,
his wig and his fringed leather garments, and revealed himself in pink
fleshings as the principal bareback rider.

They screamed in a chorus of delight when the funny old clown, who had
been forcibly deprived of three tin flutes in rapid succession, now
produced yet a fourth from the seemingly inexhaustible depths of his
baggy white pants--a flute with a string and a bent pin affixed to
it--and, secretly hooking the pin in the tail of the cross ringmaster's
coat, was thereafter enabled to toot sharp shrill blasts at frequent
intervals, much to the chagrin of the ringmaster, who seemed utterly
unable to discover the whereabouts of the instrument dangling behind
him.

But no one among them whooped louder or laughed longer than their
elderly and bewhiskered friend, who sat among them, paying the bills. As
his guests they stayed for the concert; and, following this, they
patronised the side show in a body. They had been almost the first upon
the scene; assuredly they were the last of the audience to quit it.

Indeed, before they trailed their confrère away from the spot the sun
was nearly down; and at scores of supper tables all over town the tale
of poor old Peep O'Day's latest exhibition of freakishness was being
retailed, with elaborations, to interested auditors. Estimates of the
sum probably expended by him in this crowning extravagance ranged well
up into the hundreds of dollars.

As for the object of these speculations, he was destined not to eat any
supper at all that night. Something happened that so upset him as to
make him forget the meal altogether. It began to happen when he reached
the modest home of P. Gafford, adjoining the Gafford stables, on Locust
Street, and found sitting on the lowermost step of the porch a young man
of untidy and unshaven aspect, who hailed him affectionately as Uncle
Paul, and who showed deep annoyance and acute distress upon being
rebuffed with chill words.

It is possible that the strain of serving a three-months' sentence, on
the technical charge of vagrancy, in a workhouse somewhere in Indiana,
had affected the young man's nerves. His ankle bones still ached where
the ball and chain had been hitched; on his palms the blisters induced
by the uncongenial use of a sledge hammer on a rock pile had hardly as
yet turned to calluses. So it is only fair to presume that his nervous
system felt the stress of his recent confining experiences.

Almost tearfully he pleaded with Peep O'Day to remember the ties of
blood that bound them; repeatedly he pointed out that he was the only
known kinsman of the other in all the world, and, therefore, had more
reason than any other living being to expect kindness and generosity at
his uncle's hands. He spoke socialistically of the advisability of an
equal division; failing to make any impression here he mentioned the
subject of a loan--at first hopefully, but finally despairingly.

When he was done Peep O'Day, in a perfectly colourless and unsympathetic
voice, bade him good-by--not good night but good-by! And, going inside
the house, he closed the door behind him, leaving his newly returned
relative outside and quite alone.

At this the young man uttered violent language; but, since there was
nobody present to hear him, it is likely he found small satisfaction in
his profanity, rich though it may have been in metaphor and variety. So
presently he betook himself off, going straight to the office in Legal
Row of H. B. Sublette, attorney at law.

From the circumstance that he found Mr. Sublette in, though it was long
past that gentleman's office hours, and, moreover, found Mr. Sublette
waiting in an expectant and attentive attitude, it might have been
adduced by one skilled in the trick of putting two and two together that
the pair of them had reached a prior understanding sometime during the
day; and that the visit of the young man to the Gafford home and his
speeches there had all been parts of a scheme planned out at a prior
conference.

Be this as it may, as soon as Mr. Sublette had heard his caller's
version of the meeting upon the porch he lost no time in taking certain
legal steps. That very night, on behalf of his client, denominated in
the documents as Percival Dwyer, Esquire, he prepared a petition
addressed to the circuit judge of the district, setting forth that,
inasmuch as Paul Felix O'Day had by divers acts shown himself to be of
unsound mind, now, therefore, came his nephew and next of kin praying
that a committee or curator be appointed to take over the estate of the
said Paul Felix O'Day, and administer the same in accordance with the
orders of the court until such time as the said Paul Felix O'Day should
recover his reason, or should pass from this life, and so forth and so
on; not to mention whereases in great number and aforesaids abounding
throughout the text in the utmost profusion.

On the following morning the papers were filed with Circuit Clerk Milam.
That vigilant barrister, Mr. Sublette, brought them in person to the
courthouse before nine o'clock, he having the interests of his client at
heart and perhaps also visions of a large contingent fee in his mind. No
retainer had been paid. The state of Mr. Dwyer's finances--or, rather,
the absence of any finances--had precluded the performance of that
customary detail; but to Mr. Sublette's experienced mind the prospects
of future increment seemed large.

Accordingly he was all for prompt action. Formally he said he wished to
go on record as demanding for his principal a speedy hearing of the
issue, with a view to preventing the defendant named in the pleadings
from dissipating any more of the estate lately bequeathed to him and now
fully in his possession--or words to that effect.

Mr. Milam felt justified in getting into communication with Judge Priest
over the long-distance phone; and the Judge, cutting short his vacation
and leaving uncaught vast numbers of bass and perch in Reelfoot Lake,
came home, arriving late that night.

Next morning, having issued divers orders in connection with the
impending litigation, he sent a messenger to find Peep O'Day and to
direct O'Day to come to the courthouse for a personal interview.

Shortly thereafter a scene that had occurred some two months earlier,
with His Honour's private chamber for a setting, was substantially
duplicated: There was the same cast of two, the same stage properties,
the same atmosphere of untidy tidiness. And, as before, the dialogue was
in Judge Priest's hands. He led and his fellow character followed his
leads.

"Peep," he was saying, "you understand, don't you, that this here
fragrant nephew of yours that's turned up from nowheres in particular is
fixin' to git ready to try to prove that you are feeble-minded? And, on
top of that, that he's goin' to ask that a committee be app'inted fur
you--in other words, that somebody or other shall be named by the court,
meanin' me, to take charge of your property and control the spendin' of
it frum now on?"

"Yes, suh," stated O'Day. "Pete Gafford he set down with me and made hit
all clear to me, yestiddy evenin', after they'd done served the papers
on me."

"All right, then. Now I'm goin' to fix the hearin' fur to-morrow mornin'
at ten. The other side is askin' fur a quick decision; and I rather
figger they're entitled to it. Is that agreeable to you?"

"Whutever you say, Judge."

"Well, have you retained a lawyer to represent your interests in court?
That's the main question that I sent fur you to ast you."

"Do I need a lawyer, Judge?"

"Well, there have been times when I regarded lawyers ez bein'
superfluous," stated Judge Priest dryly. "Still, in most cases litigants
do have 'em round when the case is bein' heard."

"I don't know ez I need any lawyer to he'p me say whut I've got to say,"
said O'Day. "Judge, you ain't never ast me no questions about the way
I've been carryin' on sence I come into this here money; but I reckin
mebbe this is ez good a time ez any to tell you jest why I've been
actin' the way I've done. You see, suh----"

"Hold on!" broke in Judge Priest. "Up till now, ez my friend, it would
'a' been perfectly proper fur you to give me your confidences ef you
were minded so to do; but now I reckin you'd better not. You see, I'm
the judge that's got to decide whether you are a responsible
person--whether you're mentally capable of handlin' your own financial
affairs, or whether you ain't. So you'd better wait and make your
statement in your own behalf to me whilst I'm settin' on the bench. I'll
see that you git an opportunity to do so and I'll listen to it; and I'll
give it all the consideration it's deservin' of.

"And, on second thought, p'raps it would only be a waste of time and
money fur you to go hirin' a lawyer specially to represent you. Under
the law it's my duty, in sech a case ez this here one is, to app'int a
member of the bar to serve durin' the proceedin's ez your guardian _ad
litem_.

"You don't need to be startled," he added as O'Day flinched at the sound
in his ears of these strange and fearsome words. "A guardian _ad litem_
is simply a lawyer that tends to your affairs till the case is settled
one way or the other. Ef you had a dozen lawyers I'd have to app'int him
jest the same. So you don't need to worry about that part of it.

"That's all. You kin go now ef you want to. Only, ef I was you, I
wouldn't draw out any more money frum the bank 'twixt now and the time
when I make my decision."

All things considered, it was an unusual assemblage that Judge Priest
regarded over the top rims of his glasses as he sat facing it in his
broad armchair, with the flat top of the bench intervening between him
and the gathering. Not often, even in the case of exciting murder
trials, had the old courtroom held a larger crowd; certainly never had
it held so many boys. Boys, and boys exclusively, filled the back rows
of benches downstairs. More boys packed the narrow shelf-like balcony
that spanned the chamber across its far end--mainly small boys,
barefooted, sunburned, freckled-faced, shock-headed boys. And, for
boys, they were strangely silent and strangely attentive.

The petitioner sat with his counsel, Mr. Sublette. The petitioner had
been newly shaved, and from some mysterious source had been equipped
with a neat wardrobe. Plainly he was endeavouring to wear a look of
virtue, which was a difficult undertaking, as you would understand had
you known the petitioner.

The defending party to the action was seated across the room, touching
elbows with old Colonel Farrell, dean of the local bar and its most
florid orator.

"The court will designate Col. Horatio Farrell as guardian _ad litem_
for the defendant during these proceedings," Judge Priest had stated a
few minutes earlier, using the formal and grammatical language he
reserved exclusively for his courtroom.

At once old Colonel Farrell had hitched his chair up alongside O'Day;
had asked him several questions in a tone inaudible to those about them;
had listened to the whispered answers of O'Day; and then had nodded his
huge curly white dome of a head, as though amply satisfied with the
responses.

Let us skip the preliminaries. True, they seemed to interest the
audience; here, though, they would be tedious reading. Likewise, in
touching upon the opening and outlining address of Attorney-at-Law
Sublette let us, for the sake of time and space, be very much briefer
than Mr. Sublette was. For our present purposes, I deem it sufficient to
say that in all his professional career Mr. Sublette was never more
eloquent, never more forceful, never more vehement in his allegations,
and never more convinced--as he himself stated, not once but
repeatedly--of his ability to prove the facts he alleged by competent
and unbiased testimony. These facts, he pointed out, were common
knowledge in the community; nevertheless, he stood prepared to buttress
them with the evidence of reputable witnesses, given under oath.

Mr. Sublette, having unwound at length, now wound up. He sat down,
perspiring freely and through the perspiration radiating confidence in
his contentions, confidence in the result and, most of all, unbounded
confidence in Mr. Sublette.

Now Colonel Farrell was standing up to address the court. Under the
cloak of a theatrical presence and a large orotund manner, and behind a
Ciceronian command of sonorous language, the colonel carried concealed a
shrewd old brain. It was as though a skilled marksman lurked in ambush
amid a tangle of luxuriant foliage. In this particular instance,
moreover, it is barely possible that the colonel was acting on a cue,
privily conveyed to him before the court opened.

"May it please Your Honour," he began, "I have just conferred with the
defendant here; and, acting in the capacity of his guardian _ad litem_,
I have advised him to waive an opening address by counsel. Indeed, the
defendant has no counsel. Furthermore, the defendant, also acting upon
my advice, will present no witnesses in his own behalf. But, with Your
Honour's permission, the defendant will now make a personal statement;
and thereafter he will rest content, leaving the final arbitrament of
the issue to Your Honour's discretion."

"I object!" exclaimed Mr. Sublette briskly.

"On what grounds does the learned counsel object?" inquired Judge
Priest.

"On the grounds that, since the mental competence of this man is
concerned--since it is our contention that he is patently and plainly a
victim of senility, an individual prematurely in his dotage--any
utterances by him will be of no value whatsoever in aiding the
conscience and intelligence of the court to arrive at a fair and just
conclusion regarding the defendant's mental condition."

Mr. Sublette excelled in the use of big words; there was no doubt about
that.

"The objection is overruled," said Judge Priest. He nodded in the
direction of O'Day and Colonel Farrell. "The court will hear the
defendant. He is not to be interrupted while making his statement. The
defendant may proceed."

Without further urging, O'Day stood up, a tall, slab-sided rack of a
man, with his long arms dangling at his sides, half facing Judge Priest
and half facing his nephew and his nephew's lawyer. Without hesitation
he began to speak. And this was what he said:

"There's mebbe some here ez knows about how I was raised and fetched up.
My paw and my maw died when I was jest only a baby; so I was brung up
out here at the old county porehouse ez a pauper. I can't remember the
time when I didn't have to work for my board and keep, and work hard.
While other boys was goin' to school and playin' hooky, and goin' in
washin' in the creek, and playin' games, and all sech ez that, I had to
work. I never done no playin' round in my whole life--not till here jest
recently, anyway.

"But I always craved to play round some. I didn't never say nothin'
about it to nobody after I growed up, 'cause I figgered it out they
wouldn't understand and mebbe'd laugh at me; but all these years, ever
sence I left that there porehouse, I've had a hankerin' here inside of
me"--he lifted one hand and touched his breast--"I've had a hankerin' to
be a boy and to do all the things a boy does; to do the things I was
chiselled out of doin' whilst I was of a suitable age to be doin' 'em. I
call to mind that I uster dream in my sleep about doin' 'em; but the
dream never come true--not till jest here lately. It didn't have no
chancet to come true--not till then.

"So, when this money come to me so sudden and unbeknownstlike I said to
myself that I was goin' to make that there dream come true; and I
started out fur to do it. And I done it! And I reckin that's the cause
of my bein' here to-day, accused of bein' feeble-minded. But, even so, I
don't regret it none. Ef it was all to do over ag'in I'd do it jest the
very same way.

"Why, I never knowed whut it was, till here two months or so ago, to
have my fill of bananas and candy and gingersnaps, and all sech
knickknacks ez them. All my life I've been cravin' secretly to own a
pair of red-topped boots with brass toes on 'em, like I used to see
other boys wearin' in the wintertime when I was out yonder at that
porehouse wearin' an old pair of somebody else's cast-off shoes--mebbe a
man's shoes, with rags wropped round my feet to keep the snow frum
comin' through the cracks in 'em, and to keep 'em frum slippin' right
spang off my feet. I got three toes frostbit oncet durin' a cold spell,
wearin' them kind of shoes. But here the other week I found myself able
to buy me some red-top boots with brass toes on 'em. So I had 'em made
to order and I'm wearin' 'em now. I wear 'em reg'lar even ef it is
summertime. I take a heap of pleasure out of 'em. And, also, all my life
long I've been wantin' to go to a circus. But not till three days ago I
didn't never git no chancet to go to one.

"That gentleman yonder--Mister Sublette--he 'lowed jest now that I was
leadin' a lot of little boys in this here town into bad habits. He said
that I was learnin' 'em nobody knowed whut devilment. And he spoke of my
havin' egged 'em on to steal watermelons frum Mister Bell's watermelon
patch out here three miles frum town, on the Marshallville gravel road.
You-all heared whut he jest now said about that.

"I don't mean no offence and I beg his pardon fur contradictin' him
right out before everybody here in the big courthouse; but, mister,
you're wrong. I don't lead these here boys astray that I've been runnin'
round with. They're mighty nice clean boys, all of 'em. Some of 'em are
mighty near ez pore ez whut I uster be; but there ain't no real harm in
any of 'em. We git along together fine--me and them. And, without no
preachin', nor nothin' like that, I've done my best these weeks we've
been frolickin' and projectin' round together to keep 'em frum growin'
up to do mean things.

"I use chawin' tobacco myself; but I've tole 'em, I don't know how many
times, that ef they chaw it'll stunt 'em in their growth. And I've got
several of 'em that was smokin' cigarettes on the sly to promise me
they'd quit. So I don't figger ez I've done them boys any real harm by
goin' round with 'em. And I believe ef you was to ast 'em they'd all
tell you the same, suh.

"Now about them watermelons: Sence this gentleman has brung them
watermelons up, I'm goin' to tell you-all the truth about that too."

He cast a quick, furtive look, almost a guilty look, over his shoulder
toward the rear of the courtroom before he went on:

"Them watermelons wasn't really stole at all. I seen Mister Dick Bell
beforehand and arranged with him to pay him in full fur whutever damage
mout be done. But, you see, I knowed watermelons tasted sweeter to a boy
ef he thought he'd hooked 'em out of a patch; so I never let on to my
little pardners yonder that I'd the same ez paid Mister Bell in advance
fur the melons we took out of his patch and et in the woods. They've all
been thinkin' up till now that we really hooked them watermelons. But ef
that was wrong I'm sorry fur it.

"Mister Sublette, you jest now said that I was fritterin' away my
property on vain foolishment. Them was the words you used--'fritterin''
and 'vain foolishment.' Mebbe you're right, suh, about the fritterin'
part; but ef spendin' money in a certain way gives a man ez much
pleasure ez it's give me these last two months, and ef the money is
his'n by rights, I figger it can't be so very foolish; though it may
'pear so to some.

"Excusin' these here clothes I've got on and these here boots, which
ain't paid fur yet, but are charged up to me on Felsburg Brothers'
books and Mister M. Biederman's books, I didn't spend only a dollar a
day, or mebbe two dollars, and once three dollars in a single day out of
whut was comin' to me. The Judge here, he let me have that out of his
own pocket; and I paid him back. And that was all I did spend till here
three days ago when that there circus come to town. I reckin I did spend
a right smart then.

"My money had come frum the old country only the day before; so I went
to the bank and they writ out one of them pieces of paper which is
called a check, and I signed it--with my mark; and they give me the
money I wanted--an even two hundred dollars. And part of that there
money I used to pay fur circus tickets fur all the little boys and
little girls I could find in this town that couldn't 'a' got to the
circus no other way. Some of 'em are settin' back there behind you-all
now--some of the boys, I mean; I don't see none of the little girls.

"There was several of 'em told me at the time they hadn't never seen a
circus--not in their whole lives! Fur that matter, I hadn't, neither;
but I didn't want no pore child in this town to grow up to be ez old ez
I am without havin' been to at least one circus. So I taken 'em all in
and paid all the bills; and when night come there wasn't but 'bout nine
dollars left out of the whole two hundred that I'd started out with in
the mornin'. But I don't begredge spendin' it. It looks to me like it
was money well invested. They all seemed to enjoy it; and I know I done
so.

"There may be bigger circuses'n whut that one was; but I don't see how a
circus could 'a' been any better than this here one I'm tellin' about,
ef it was ten times ez big. I don't regret the investment and I don't
aim to lie about it now. Mister Sublette, I'd do the same thing over
ag'in ef the chance should come, lawsuit or no lawsuit. Ef you should
win this here case mebbe I wouldn't have no second chance.

"Ef some gentleman is app'inted ez a committee to handle my money it's
likely he wouldn't look at the thing the same way I do; and it's likely
he wouldn't let me have so much money all in one lump to spend takin' a
passel of little shavers that ain't no kin to me to the circus and to
the side show, besides lettin' 'em stay fur the grand concert or
after-show, and all. But I done it once; and I've got it to remember
about and think about in my own mind ez long ez I live.

"I'm 'bout finished now. There's jest one thing more I'd like to say,
and that is this: Mister Sublette he said a minute ago that I was in my
second childhood. Meanin' no offence, suh, but you was wrong there too.
The way I look at it, a man can't be in his second childhood without
he's had his first childhood; and I was cheated plum' out of mine. I'm
more'n sixty years old, ez near ez I kin figger; but I'm tryin' to be a
boy before it's too late."

He paused a moment and looked round him.

"The way I look at it, Judge Priest, suh, and you-all, every man that
grows up, no matter how old he may git to be, is entitled to 'a' been a
boy oncet in his lifetime. I--I reckin that's all."

He sat down and dropped his eyes upon the floor, as though ashamed that
his temerity should have carried him so far. There was a strange little
hush filling the courtroom. It was Judge Priest who broke it.

"The court," he said, "has by the words just spoken by this man been
sufficiently advised as to the sanity of the man himself. The court
cares to hear nothing more from either side on this subject. The
petition is dismissed."

Very probably these last words may have been as so much Greek to the
juvenile members of the audience; possibly, though, they were made aware
of the meaning of them by the look upon the face of Nephew Percival
Dwyer and the look upon the face of Nephew Percival Dwyer's attorney. At
any rate, His Honour hardly had uttered the last syllable of his
decision before, from the rear of the courtroom and from the gallery
above, there arose a shrill, vehement, sincere sound of
yelling--exultant, triumphant and deafening. It continued for upward of
a minute before the small disturbers remembered where they were and
reduced themselves to a state of comparative quiet.

For reasons best known to himself, Judge Priest, who ordinarily stickled
for order and decorum in his courtroom, made no effort to quell the
outburst or to have it quelled--not even when a considerable number of
the adults present joined in it, having first cleared their throats of a
slight huskiness that had come upon them, severally and generally.

Presently the Judge rapped for quiet--and got it. It was apparent that
he had more to say; and all there hearkened to hear what it might be.

"I have just this to add," quoth His Honour: "It is the official
judgment of this court that the late defendant, being entirely sane, is
competent to manage his own affairs after his preferences.

"And it is the private opinion of this court that not only is the late
defendant sane but that he is the sanest man in this entire
jurisdiction. Mister Clerk, court stands adjourned."

Coming down the three short steps from the raised platform of the bench,
Judge Priest beckoned to Sheriff Giles Birdsong, who, at the tail of the
departing crowd, was shepherding its last exuberant members through the
doorway.

"Giles," said Judge Priest in an undertone, when the worthy sheriff had
drawn near, "the circuit clerk tells me there's an indictment fur
malicious mischief ag'in this here Perce Dwyer knockin' round amongst
the records somewheres--an indictment the grand jury returned several
sessions back, but which was never pressed, owin' to the sudden
departure frum our midst of the person in question.

"I wonder ef it would be too much trouble fur you to sort of drap a hint
in the ear of the young man or his lawyer that the said indictment is
apt to be revived, and that the said Dwyer is liable to be tuck into
custody by you and lodged in the county jail sometime during the ensuin'
forty-eight hours--without he should see his way clear durin' the
meantime to get clean out of this city, county and state! Would it?"

"Trouble? No, suh! It won't be no trouble to me," said Mr. Birdsong
promptly. "Why, it'll be more of a pleasure, Judge."

And so it was.

Except for one small added and purely incidental circumstance, our
narrative is ended. That same afternoon Judge Priest sat on the front
porch of his old white house out on Clay Street, waiting for Jeff
Poindexter to summon him to supper. Peep O'Day opened the front gate and
came up the gravelled walk between the twin rows of silver-leaf poplars.
The Judge, rising to greet his visitor, met him at the top step.

"Come in," bade the Judge heartily, "and set down a spell and rest your
face and hands."

"No, suh; much obliged, but I ain't got only a minute to stay," said
O'Day. "I jest come out here, suh, to thank you fur whut you done to-day
on my account in the big courthouse, and--and to make you a little kind
of a present."

"It's all right to thank me," said Judge Priest; "but I couldn't accept
any reward fur renderin' a decision in accordance with the plain facts."

"'Tain't no gift of money, or nothin' like that," O'Day hastened to
explain. "Really, suh, it don't amount to nothin' at all, scursely. But
a little while ago I happened to be in Mr. B. Weil & Son's store, doin'
a little tradin', and I run acrost a new kind of knickknack, which it
seemed like to me it was about the best thing I ever tasted in my whole
life. So, on the chancet, suh, that you might have a sweet tooth, too, I
taken the liberty of bringin' you a sack of 'em and--and--and here they
are, suh; three flavors--strawberry, lemon and vanilly."

Suddenly overcome with confusion, he dislodged a large-sized paper bag
from his side coat pocket and thrust it into Judge Priest's hands; then,
backing away, he turned and clumped down the graveled path in great and
embarrassed haste.

Judge Priest opened the bag and peered down into it. It contained a
sticky, sugary dozen of flattened confections, each moulded round a
short length of wooden splinter. These sirupy articles, which have since
come into quite general use, are known, I believe, as all-day suckers.

When Judge Priest looked up again, Peep O'Day was outside the gate,
clumping down the uneven sidewalk of Clay Street with long strides of
his booted legs. Half a dozen small boys, who, it was evident, had
remained hidden during the ceremony of presentation, now mysteriously
appeared and were accompanying the departing donor, half trotting to
keep up with him.

CHAPTER IV

THE LUCK PIECE

Until now Trencher--to give him the name by which of all the names he
used he best was known--had kept his temper in hobbles, no matter what
or how great the provocation. As one whose mode of livelihood was trick
and device outside the law it had behooved him ever to restrain himself
from violent outbreaks, to school and curb and tame his natural
tendencies as a horsebreaker might gentle a spirited colt. A man who
held his disposition always under control could think faster than any
man who permitted his passions to jangle his nerves. Besides, he had the
class contempt of the high-grade confidence man--the same being the
aristocrat of the underworld--for the crude and violent and therefore
doubly dangerous codes of the stick-up, who is a highwayman; and the
prowler, who is a burglar; and the yegg, who is a safe blower of sorts.

Until now Trencher had held fast by the self-imposed rules of his
self-imposed discipline, and so doing had lived well and lived safe. It
was an unfortunate thing all round that this little rat of a Sonntag had
crossed him at an hour when he was profoundly irritated by the collapse
of their elaborately planned and expensive scheme to divest that
Cheyenne cattleman of his bank roll at the wire game. And it was a
doubly unfortunate thing for Sonntag seeing that Sonntag had just been
shot three times with his own automatic and was now dead or should be.

It was like Sonntag--and most utterly unlike Trencher--to whine over
spilt milk and seek to shift the blame for the failure of their plot to
any pair of shoulders rather than his own thin pair. And to the very
life it was like Sonntag that at the climax of the quarrel he should
have made a gun play. As Trencher now realised, it had been his mistake
in the first place that he took Sonntag on for a partner in the thwarted
operation; but it had been Sonntag's great, fatal mistake that he had
drawn a weapon against a man who could think faster and act faster in
emergencies than Sonntag ever had been able to do. Having drawn it
Sonntag should have used it. But having drawn it he had hesitated for a
space not to be measured in computable time--and that delay had been his
undoing.

The gun-pulling episode had taken place in Thirty-ninth Street, between
Sixth Avenue and Broadway, but nearer Broadway than Sixth Avenue, at a
moment when that block of Thirty-ninth Street was as near empty as ever
it gets to be. The meeting in the darkened place, just where the portico
at the side entrance of the old Jollity Theatre, extending out across
the sidewalk, made a patch of obscurity in the half-lit street, had been
a meeting by chance so far as Trencher was concerned. He had not been
looking for Sonntag; hadn't wanted to see Sonntag. Whether Sonntag had
been seeking him was something which nobody probably would ever know
this side the hereafter.

To the best of Trencher's belief there had been but one possible
eyewitness to the actual shooting. Out of the tail of his eye, just
before he and Sonntag came to grips, he had caught a glimpse of this
surmisable third party. He had sensed rather than seen that an elderly
bearded man, perhaps the watchman of the closed theatre, passed along
the sidewalk, going east. It was Trencher's impression that the man had
gone on by without halting. However, on that point he could not be sure.
What the onlooker had seen--if indeed there were an onlooker--could have
been only this: Two men, one fairly tall and dressed in a sprightly
fashion, one short and dark, engaged in a vehement but whispered quarrel
there in the cloaking shadow close up to the locked double doors of the
Jollity; a sudden hostile move on the part of the slighter man, backing
away and reaching for his flank; a quick forward jump by the taller man
to close with the other; a short sharp struggle as the pair of them
fought for possession of the revolver which the dark man had jerked from
his flank pocket; then the tall man, victorious, shoving his antagonist
clear of him and stepping back a pace; and on top of this the three
sharp reports and the three little spurts of fire bridging the short gap
between the sundered enemies like darting red hyphens to punctuate the
enacted tragedy.

Now the tall man, the one conspicuously dressed, had been Trencher. The
shooting accomplished he stood where he was only long enough to see
Sonntag fold up and sink down in a slumped shape in the doorway. He had
seen men, mortally stricken, who folded up in that very same way;
therefore he appraised Sonntag as one already dead, or at least as one
who would die very speedily.

As he stepped out across the sidewalk into the roadway he let the
automatic fall alongside the curb. The instant he had done this the heat
of his hate departed from him leaving him cool and clear-minded and
alert. It was as though the hot fumes of rage had all evaporated from
his brain in the same twentieth part of a second that he had spent in
discarding the weapon. For the reason that he was again entirely
himself, resourceful and steady, he did not fall into the error of
running away. To run away in this instant was to invite pursuit.
Instead he walked to the middle of the street, halted and looked about
him--the picture of a citizen who had been startled by the sound of
shots. This artifice, he felt sure, served to disarm possible suspicion
on the part of any one of the persons who came hurrying up from east and
west and from the north, across the street. Two or three of these first
arrivals almost brushed him as they lunged past, drawing in toward the
spot where Sonntag's doubled-up body made a darker blot in the darkened
parallelogram beneath the portico.

Trencher had been in close places before now--close places when
something smacking of violence had occurred--and he knew or felt he knew
what next would happen to give him the precious grace of seconds and
perhaps of minutes. Those who came foremost upon the scene would,
through caution, hesitate for a brief space of time before venturing
close up to where the hunched shape lay. Then having circled and drawn
in about the victim of the shooting they would for another brief period
huddle together, asking excited and pointless questions of one another,
some of them perhaps bending down and touching the victim to see whether
he lived, some of them looking round for a policeman, some of them doing
nothing at all--except confusedly to get in the way of everybody else.
This would be true of ninety-nine average individuals out of an average
hundred of city population. But the hundredth man would keep his wits
about him, seeking for the cause of the thing rather than concerning
himself with the accomplished effect. For the moment it was this
hundredth man Trencher would have to fear. Nevertheless, it would never
do for him to show undue haste. Bearing himself in the matter of a
disinterested citizen who had business that was not to be interfered
with by street brawls, he turned away from the south, toward which he
had been looking, shrugged his shoulders, and moving briskly, but
without any seeming great haste, he made for the revolving door at the
Thirty-ninth Street entrance to Wallinger's Hotel, diagonally across
from the Jollity. With one hand on a panel of the door he stopped again
and looked back.

Already, so soon, a crowd was gathering over the way--a little
crowd--which at once inevitably would become a dense jostling crowd. A
policeman, not to be mistaken even at a distance of seventy feet or more
for anyone but a policeman, had turned the corner out of Broadway and
was running down the opposite pavement. The policeman's arrival was to
be expected; it would be his business to arrive at the earliest possible
moment, and having arrived to lead the man hunt that would follow. What
Trencher, peering over his shoulder, sought for, was the hundredth
man--the man who, ignoring the lesser fact of a dead body, would strive
first off to catch up the trail of whosoever had done this thing.

Trencher thought he made him out. There was to be seen an elderly man,
roughly dressed, possibly the same man whose proximity Trencher had felt
rather than observed just before Sonntag made the gun play, and this man
was half-squatted out on the asphalt with his back to where the rest
circled and swirled about the body. Moreover, this person was staring
directly in Trencher's direction. As Trencher passed within the
revolving door he saw the man pivot on his heels and start at an angle
toward the policeman just as the policeman was swallowed up in the rings
of figures converging into the theatre doorway.

If the policeman were of a common-enough type of policeman--that is to
say, if he were the sort of policeman who would waste time examining
Sonntag's body for signs of life and then waste more time asking
questions of those who had preceded him to the place, and yet more time
peering about for the weapon that had been used; or if, in the
excitement with everybody shouting together, the one man who possibly
had a real notion concerning the proper description of the vanished
slayer found difficulty in securing the policeman's attention--why then,
in any one of these cases, or better still, in all of them, Trencher had
a chance. With a definite and intelligently guided pursuit starting
forthwith he would be lost. But with three minutes, or two even, of
delay vouchsafed him before the alarm took shape and purpose he might
make it.

Accepting the latter contingency as the assured one he formed a plan
instantaneously. Indeed, it sprang full-formed into his mind as the door
swung round behind him. It added to the immediate difficulties of his
present situation that he was most notably marked--by his garb. He had
the dramatic sense well developed, as any man must have who succeeds at
his calling. When Trencher played a part he dressed the part. In the
staging of the plot for the undoing of the Cheyenne cattleman his had
been the rôle of the sporting ex-telegraph operator, who could get
"flashes" on the result of horse races before the names of the winners
came over an imaginary tapped wire to the make-believe pool room where
the gull was stripped; and he had been at some pains and expense to
procure a wardrobe befitting the character.

The worst of it was that he now wore the make-up--the short
fawn-coloured overcoat with its big showy buttons of smoked pearl, the
brown derby hat with its striking black band, and the pair of light-tan
spats. Stripped of these things he would be merely a person in a costume
in nowise to be distinguished from the costumes of any number of other
men in the Broadway district. But for the moment there was neither
opportunity nor time to get rid of all of them without attracting the
attention that would be fatal to his prospects. Men who have nothing to
hide do not remove spats in a hotel lobby, nor do they go about public
places bareheaded in the nighttime. Now he could do but one thing to
alter his appearance.

Midway of the cross hall which he had entered and which opened into the
main lobby he slowed his gait long enough to undo the overcoat and slip
out of it. The top button caught fast in its buttonhole, the coat being
new and its buttonholes being stiff. He gave a sharp tug at the
rebellious cloth, and the button, which probably had been insecurely
sewed on in the first place, came away from its thread fastenings and
lodged in the fingers of his right hand. Mechanically he dropped it into
a side pocket of the overcoat and a moment later, with the garment
turned inside out so that only its silk lining showed, and held under
his arm, he had come out of the sideway and was in the lobby proper.

He was prepared mentally to find signs of an alarm here--to encounter
persons hurrying toward the Thirty-ninth Street side of the building.
But nothing of the sort was afoot. A darky orchestra was playing a jazz
tune very loudly in the café at the left of the Broadway entrance, so it
was not only possible but very likely that the sounds of the shots had
not been heard inside the hotel at all. Certainly his eye, sweeping the
place, discovered no evidences of any unusual stir. Perhaps half a
dozen individuals were traversing the tiled floor, but none of them in
any seeming hurry.

With no suggestion of agitation about him anywhere and with nothing
furtive or stealthy in his movements, Trencher boldly passed the corner
of the desk, crossed the lobby, went along the front of the news stand,
where a young woman stood among her wares, and through another set of
revolving doors came out upon Broadway. It was that one hour of the
night--a quarter of eleven o'clock, while the last acts are still going
on and before the theatres give up their audiences--when Broadway's
sidewalks are not absolutely overflowing with jostling, pouring currents
of people. Numbers were abroad, for numbers always are abroad in this
part of the town, be the time of day or of night what it may, but there
was no congestion. This was as it should be; it suited this man's
purposes exactly.

He issued forth, and a few rods north of the corner saw the person for
whom he was seeking; at least he saw a most likely candidate--a ragged
darky, in a district where ragged darkies unless they be beggars are not
often seen, who with his hands in his pockets and his coat collar turned
up was staring into the window of a small clothing shop two doors above
the narrow-fronted hotel. Trencher made for him. Remember, all
this--from the moment of the shooting until now--had taken much less
time than has been required for me to describe it in sequence or for
you to read about it.

He tapped the darky on the arm.

"Boy," he said sharply, "want to pick up some easy money quick?"

"Yas, suh, I does!" The negro's eyes shone.

"Listen then: I've got to catch a train--sooner than I expected. My
bag's packed and waiting for me up here at my boarding house in West
Forty-fifth Street--Number 374 is the address--just west of
Broadway--tall brownstone house with a high stoop. Get me? The bag's
downstairs in the hall. The hall boy--a coloured fellow named Fred--is
watching it for me. If I go in a cab I may not get to the station in
time. If you go after it for me at a run I may catch my train. See?
Here's a dollar down in advance. Tell Fred Mr. Thompson sent you--that's
me, Thompson. He'll give it to you--I told him I'd send for it. I'll be
waiting right here. If you get back with it in seven minutes I'll give
you another dollar--and if you get back inside of seven minutes I'll
make it two dollars more. Got the number in your mind?"

"Yas, suh--three seventy-fo' Wes' Forty-fift', you said."

"Correct. Now run like the very devil up Broadway to Forty-fifth and
turn west!"

"Boss," cried the darky, "Ise gone!"

He was, too. His splay feet in their broken shoes fairly spurned the
sidewalk as he darted northward, boring his way through the lanes of
pedestrians, knocking people aside out of their stride and followed as
he went by a wake of curses and grunts and curious glances. On a street
where nearly everyone trots but few gallop, the sight of a running man
catches the popular interest instantly, the common theory being that the
runner has done something wrong and is trying to get away, else he would
not run.

The instant the negro turned his back on him, Trencher slid inside the
recessed entrance of the clothing store and flattened himself against
its door. If chance had timed the occurrence just right he would win the
reprieve that he required for what he meant next to undertake. And sure
enough, as it turned out, chance had so timed it.

For just as he pressed his bulk into the recess the man hunt manifested
itself. Bursting headlong out of the front of Wallinger's Hotel came a
policeman--doubtlessly the one already seen by Trencher--and just behind
the policeman a roughly dressed bearded man, and with these two, at
their heels, a jostling impetuous swarm of other men, to be joined
instantly by yet more men, who had run round the corner of the hotel
from Thirty-ninth Street, instead of passing through its lobby. For the
veriest fraction of time they all slowed down, casting about them with
their eyes for a trail to follow.

Trencher, looking slantwise to the south, could see them plainly. The
foremost members of the hesitating and uncertain group were not sixty
feet from him. He forgot to breathe.

Then, all together, half a dozen pointing arms were flung out to the
north.

"There he goes, officer, runnin'! See 'im yonder? See 'im?"

With a forward surge and a great clatter of feet the hunt was renewed.
Past Trencher's refuge, with never a look this way or that, the
policeman, the bearded man, all the rest of them, went pelting along the
sidewalk, giving tongue like beagles. He could have put forth his hand
and touched some of them as they sped by him. Numbers of foot travellers
joined in the tail of the chase. Those who did not join it faced about
to watch. Knowing that for a bit he would practically be free of the
danger of close scrutiny, Trencher stepped out upon the sidewalk and
looking north caught a glimpse of a bent fleeing figure scuttling up
Broadway a block and a half beyond.

By this trick he had broken the trail and sent the pack off on a wrong
scent. So far so good. He figured the outlook after this fashion: Set
upon earning the double fee promised him the deluded darky, as he could
tell, was still going at top speed, unconscious of any pursuit. If he
continued to maintain his gait, if none tripped him, the probabilities
were he would be round the corner in Forty-fifth Street, trying to find
a mythical boarding house and a mythical hall boy named Fred, before the
foremost of the runners behind overtook and seized him. Then would
follow shouts, yells, a babble of accusations, denials of all wrongful
intent by the frightened captive and explanations by him to the
policeman of his reason for running so hard.

Following on this the chase would double back on its tracks, and at once
policemen in numbers, along with volunteers, would be combing the
district for the real fugitive. Still, barring the unforeseen, a few
minutes must intervene before this neighbourhood search would be getting
under way; and meanwhile the real fugitive, calmly enough, was moving
along in the rear of the rearmost of those who ran without knowing why
they ran. He did not go far though--he dared not go far. Any second the
darky might be tackled and thrown by someone on ahead, and besides there
might be individuals close at hand who had not joined in the hue and
cry, but who in some way had learned that the man so badly wanted wore
such-and-such distinguishing garments.

It was because of this latter contingency that Trencher had not tried to
slip back into Thirty-ninth Street. That had been his first impulse, but
he discarded the thought as it came to him. His mind peopled the
vicinity immediately south and east of him with potential enemies. To
the north alone, in the wake of the chase, could he count upon a hope of
transient security, and that would last only for so long as the negro
kept going. He could not get away from the spot--yet. And still it would
be the height of recklessness for him, dressed as he was, to linger
there. Temporarily he must bide where he was, and in this swarming,
bright-as-day place he must find a hiding place from which he could see
without being seen, spy without being spied upon or suspected for what
he was. Even as he calculated these obstacles he figured a possible way
out of the double-ended dilemma, or at any rate he figured his next step
toward safety from detection for the moment, and, with continued luck,
toward ultimate escape from a perilous spot where now no measure of
immunity could be either long-lived or dependable.

I have said he did not go far to reach sanctuary. To be exact he did not
go the length of the block between Thirty-ninth and Fortieth. He went
only as far as the Clarenden, newest and smartest, and, for the time
being, most popular of typical Broadway cafés, standing three buildings
north of the clothing shop, or a total distance from it, let us say, of
ninety feet. It was while he traversed those ninety feet that Trencher
summed up the contingencies that hedged him in and reached his
conclusion.

In front of the Clarenden against the curbing stood a short line of
waiting motor vehicles. With one exception they were taxicabs. At the
lower end of the queue, though, was a vast gaudy limousine, a bright
blue in body colour, with heavy trimmings of brass--and it was empty.
The chauffeur, muffled in furs, sat in his place under the overhang of
the peaked roof, with the glass slide at his right hand lowered and his
head poked out as he peered up Broadway; but the car itself, Trencher
saw, contained no occupant.

Trencher, drawing up alongside the limousine, was searching vainly for a
monogram, a crest or a name on its varnished flank while he spoke.

"Driver," he said sharply, "whose car is this?"

"Mr. O'Gavin's," the chauffeur answered without turning to look at the
person asking the question.

Trencher played a blind lead and yet not such a very blind lead either.
Big as New York was there was likely to be but one O'Gavin in it who
would have a car such as this one anchored in front of the
Clarenden--and that would be the noted bookmaker. Trencher played his
card.

"Jerome O'Gavin's, eh?" he inquired casually as though stating a
foregone conclusion.

"Yes, sir; it's his car." And now the driver twisted his body and
half-faced Trencher. "Say, boss, what's all the row about yonder?"

"Crowd chasing a pickpocket, I imagine," said Trencher indifferently.
Then putting a touch of impatience in his voice: "Where is
O'Gavin--inside?"

"Yes, sir! Said he'd be ready to go uptown at eleven. Must be near that
now."

"Pretty near it. I was to meet him here at eleven myself and I thought I
recognised his car."

"You'll find him in the grill, I guess, sir," said the driver, putting
into the remark the tone of deference due to someone who was a friend of
his employer's. "I understood him to say he had an appointment with some
gentleman there. Was it you?"

"No, but I know who the gentleman is," said Trencher. "The other man's
not such a very good friend of mine--that's why I'd rather wait outside
for Jerome than to go in there." He made a feint at looking at his
watch. "Hum, ten minutes more. Tell you what I think I'll do, driver: I
think I'll just hop inside the car until O'Gavin comes out--better than
loafing on the sidewalk, eh?"

"Just as you say. Make yourself comfortable, sir. Shall I switch on the
lights?"

"No, never mind the lights, thank you." Trencher was already taking
shelter within the limousine, making himself small on the wide back seat
and hauling a thick rug up over his lap. Under the rug one knee was bent
upward and the fingers of one hand were swiftly undoing the buttons of
one fawn-coloured spat. If the chauffeur had chanced to glance back he
would have seen nothing unusual going on. The chauffeur, though, never
glanced back. He was staring dead ahead again.

"Say, boss, they've caught the pickpocket--if that's what he was," he
cried out excitedly. "They're bringing him back."

"Glad they nailed him," answered Trencher through the glass that was
between them. He had one spat off and was now unfastening its mate.

"It looks like a nigger," added the chauffeur, supplying a fresh
bulletin as the captive was dragged nearer. "It is a nigger! Had his
nerve with him, trying to pull off a trick in this part of town."

Through the right-hand side window Trencher peered out as the mass moved
by--in front a panting policeman with his one hand gripped fast in the
collar of Trencher's late messenger, and all about the pair and behind
them a jostling, curious crowd of men and women.

"De gen'l'man dat sent me fur his bag is right down yere, I keeps
tellin' you," Trencher heard the scared darky babbling as he was yanked
past Trencher's refuge.

"All right then, show him to me, that's all," the officer was saying
impatiently.

The chauffeur twisted about in his place, following the spectacle with
his eyes. But Trencher had quit looking that way and was looking another
way. The centre of excitement had been moved again--instead of being
north of him it was now approximately ninety feet south, and he, thanks
to the shift, was once more behind it. Peering through the glass he
watched the entrance to the Clarenden.

There he saw what he wanted to see--a tall man in a wide-brimmed soft
dark hat and a long dark topcoat going up the short flight of steps that
led from the pavement into the building. Trencher wadded the spats
together and rammed them down out of sight between the back cushion and
the under cushion of the car seat, and with his overcoat inside out on
his left arm he opened the door and stepped out of the car. This retreat
had served his purpose admirably; it was time to abandon it.

"Changed my mind," he said, in explanation. "If O'Gavin doesn't hurry up
we'll be late for an engagement we've got uptown. I'm going in after
him."

"Yes; all right, sir," assented the chauffeur with his attention very
much elsewhere.

In long steps Trencher crossed the sidewalk and ran up the steps so
briskly that he passed through the door at the top of the short flight
directly behind and almost touching the tall man in the dark hat and
black coat. His heart beat fast; he was risking everything practically
on the possibilities of what this other man meant to do.

The other man did exactly what Trencher was hoping he would do. He
turned left and made for the Clarenden's famous Chinese lounging room,
which in turn opened into the main restaurant. Trencher slipped nimbly
by his quarry and so beat him to where two young women in glorified
uniforms of serving maids were stationed to receive wraps outside the
checking booth; a third girl was inside the booth, her job being to take
over checked articles from her sister helpers.

It befell therefore that Trencher surrendered his brown derby and his
short tan coat, received a pasteboard check in exchange for them and saw
them passed in over a flat shelf to be put on a hook, before the other
man had been similarly served. When the other, now revealed as wearing a
dinner jacket, came through the Orientalised passageway into the lounge,
Trencher was quite ready for him. In his life Trencher had never picked
a pocket, but as one thoroughly versed in the professionalism of the
crime world, in which he was a distinguished figure, he knew how the
trick, which is the highest phase of the art of the pickpocket, is
achieved.

The thing was most neatly and most naturally accomplished. As the man in
the dinner coat came just opposite him Trencher, swinging inward as
though to avoid collision with the end of an upholstered couch, bumped
into him, breast to breast.

"I beg your pardon," he said in contrite tones for his seeming
awkwardness, and as he said it two darting fingers and the thumb of his
right hand found and invaded the little slit of the stranger's waistcoat
pocket, whisking out the check which the stranger had but a moment
before, with Trencher watching, deposited there.

"Granted--no harm done," said the man who had been jostled, and passed
on leaving Trencher still uttering apologetic sounds. Palming the
precious pasteboard, which meant so much to him, Trencher stood where he
was until he saw the unsuspecting victim pass on through into the café
and join two other men, who got up from a table in the far corner near
one of the front windows to greet him.

Trencher followed leisurely to where a captain of waiters stood guard at
the opening in the dividing partition between the lounge and the
restaurant. Before him at his approach this functionary bowed.

"Alone, sir?" he inquired obsequiously.

"Yes and no," replied Trencher; "I'm alone now but I'll be back in half
an hour with three others. I want to engage a table for four--not too
close to the orchestra." He slipped a dollar bill into the captain's
hand.

"Very good, sir. What name, sir?"

"Tracy is the name," said Trencher.

"Quite so, sir."

The captain turned to serve a party of men and women, and Trencher fell
back. He idled back through the Chinese room, vigilant to note whether
any of the persons scattered about it were regarding him with more than
a casual interest or, more important still, whether any there present
knew him personally.

Reassured on this point he stepped out of the room and along with a
quarter for a tip tendered to one of the maids the check he had just
pilfered, meanwhile studying her face closely for any signs that she
recalled him as one who had dealt with her within the space of a minute
or so. But nothing in her looks betrayed recognition or curiosity as she
bestirred herself to reclaim the articles for which the check was a
voucher of ownership, and to help him into them.

Ten seconds later Trencher, a personality transformed, stood quite at
his ease on the top step of the flight outside the entrance to the
Clarenden looking into Broadway. The long dark overcoat which he now
wore, a commonplace roomy garment, fitted him as though it had been his
own. With its collar turned up about his cheeks it helped admirably to
disguise him. The soft black hat was a trifle large for his head. So
much the better--it came well down over his face.

The huge illuminated hands of a clock set in the middle of a winking,
blinking electric sign a few blocks north, at the triangular gore where
Seventh Avenue crosses Broadway, told him the time--six minutes of
eleven. To Trencher it seemed almost that hours must have passed since
he shot down Sonntag, and yet here was proof that not more than ten
minutes--or at the most, twelve--had elapsed. Well, he had worked fast
and with results gratifying. The spats that might have betrayed him
were safely hidden in one place--yonder between the seat cushions of
O'Gavin's car, which stood where he had left it, not thirty feet
distant. His telltale overcoat and his derby hat were safely bestowed in
the café check room behind him awaiting a claimant who meant never to
return. Even if they should be found and identified as having been worn
by the slayer of Sonntag, their presence there, he figured, would but
serve to confuse the man hunt. Broadway's living tides flowed by, its
component atoms seemingly ignorant of the fact that just round the
corner below a man had been done to death. Only at the intersection of
Thirty-ninth Street was there evidence, in the quick movement of
pedestrians out of Broadway into the cross street, that something
unusual served to draw foot passengers off their course.

In front of the clothing shop three doors south of him no special
congestion of traffic revealed itself; no scrouging knot of citizens was
to be seen, and by that Trencher reasoned that the negro had been taken
elsewhere by his captors--very probably to where the body would still be
lying, hunched up in the shadow before the Jollity's side doors. From
the original starting point the hunt doubtlessly was now reorganising.
One thing was certain--it had not eddied back this far. The men of the
law would be working on a confused basis yet awhile, anyhow. And
Trencher meant to twistify the clews still further, for all that he
felt safe enough already. For the first time a sense of security
exhilarated him. Almost it was a sense of exultation.

He descended the steps and went straight to the nearest of the rank of
parked taxicabs. Its driver was nowhere in sight. A carriage starter for
the café, in gorgeous livery, understood without being told what the
tall muffled-up gentleman desired and blew a shrill blast on a whistle.
At that the truant driver appeared, coming at a trot from down the
street.

"'Scuse me, mister," he said as he mounted to his seat at the wheel.
"Been a shootin' down the street. Guy got croaked, they say, and they
can't find the guy that croaked um."

"Never mind the shooting," said Trencher as he climbed into the cab,
whose door the starter had opened for him.

"Where to, gent?"

"Harty's Palm Garden," said Trencher, naming a restaurant a mile and a
half away, straight up Broadway. His main thought now was to get
entirely out of this part of town.

Riding along uptown Trencher explored the pockets of the pilfered
overcoat. The search produced a pair of heavy gloves, a wadded
handkerchief, two cigars, a box of matches, and, last of all, a
triangular brass token inscribed with a number and a firm name. Without
the imprint of the name Trencher would have recognised it, from its
shape alone. It had come from the check room in the upper-tier waiting
room of the Grand Central Station. Discovery of it gave him a new
idea--an idea involving no added risk but having in it added
possibilities for insuring the ultimate success of his get-away. In any
event there could be neither harm nor enhanced danger in putting it into
execution.

Therefore, when he had emerged from the cab at Harty's and had paid the
fare and had seen the driver swing his vehicle about and start off back
downtown, he walked across Columbus Circle to the west curve of it,
climbed into another taxicab and was driven by way of Fifty-ninth Street
and Fifth Avenue to the Grand Central. Here at the establishment of the
luggage-checking concessionaire on the upper level of the big terminal
he tendered the brass token to a drowsy-eyed attendant, receiving in
exchange a brown-leather suit case with letters stenciled on one end of
it, like this:

        M. K. P.
        STAMFORD, CONN.

Waving aside a red-capped negro porter, Trencher, carrying the spoil of
his latest coup, departed via one of the Vanderbilt Avenue exits.
Diagonally across the avenue was a small drug store still open for
business at this hour, as the bright lights within proved. Above its
door showed the small blue sign that marked it as containing a
telephone pay booth. For Trencher's purposes a closed booth in a small
mercantile establishment was infinitely to be preferred to the public
exchange in the terminal--less chance that the call could be traced back
to its source, less chance, too, that some inquisitive operator, trying
to kill time during a dull hour, might listen in on the wire, and so
doing overhear things not meant for her ears. He crossed over and
entered the drug store.

Except for a sleepy clerk at the rear there was no one visible within
the place. Trencher crowded his bulk into the booth, dropped the
requisite coin in the slot and very promptly got back the answering hail
from a certain number that he had called--a number at a place in the
lower fringe of the old Tenderloin.

"Is that the Three Deuces?" asked Trencher. Then: "Who's speaking--you,
Monty? . . . Know who this is, at this end? . . . Yes, that's right.
Say, is the Kid there--Kid Dineen? . . . Good! Call him to the phone,
will you, Monty? And tell him to hurry--it's devilish important."

A short pause followed and when Trencher spoke again he had dropped his
voice to a cautious half-whisper, vibrant and tense with urgency. Also
now he employed some of the argot of the underworld:

"Hello, Kid, hello! Recognise my voice, don't you? . . . Good! Now listen:
I'm in a jam. . . . What? . . . Never mind what it is; you'll know when you
see the papers in the morning if you don't know sooner. I've got to lam,
and lam quick. Right now I've got the bulls stalled off good and proper,
but I can't tell how long they'll stay stalled off. Get me? So I don't
want to be showing my map round any ticket windows. So here's what I
want you to do. Get some coin off of Monty, if you haven't got enough on
you. Then you beat it over to the Pennsylvania Station and buy me a
ticket for Pittsburgh and a section in the sleeper on the train that
leaves round one-twenty-five to-night. Then go over on Ninth Avenue to
Silver's place----What? . . . Yes; sure, that's the place. Wait for me
there in the little room upstairs over the bar, on the second floor.
They've got to make a bluff of closing up at one, but you know how to
get up into the room, don't you? . . . Good! Wait for me till I show up, or
if I get there first I'll wait for you. I ought to show inside of an
hour from now--maybe in less time than that if things keep on breaking
right. Then I'll get the ducats off of you and beat it across through
the Hudson Tube to the Manhattan Transfer and grab the rattler over
there in Jersey when she comes along from this side. That'll be all. Now
hustle!"

From the drug store he went, carrying the brown suit case with
him, round into Forty-second Street. He had taken a mental note
of the initials on the bag, but to make sure he was right he looked
at them again before he entered the big Bellhaven Hotel by its
Forty-second-Street door. At sight of him a bell boy ran across the
lobby and took from him his burden. The boy followed him, a pace in
the rear, to the desk, where a spruce young gentleman awaited their
coming. "Can I get a room with bath for the night--a quiet inside
room where I'll be able to sleep as late as I please in the morning?"
inquired Trencher.

"Certainly, sir." The room clerk appraised Trencher with a practiced
eye. "Something for about four dollars?"

"That'll do very well," agreed Trencher, taking the pen which the clerk
had dipped in ink and handed over to him.

Bearing in mind the letters and the address on the suit case, Trencher
registered as M. K. Potter, Stamford, Conn. Meanwhile the clerk had
taken a key from a rack containing a vast number of similar keys.

"I won't leave a call--and I don't want to be disturbed," warned
Trencher.

"Very well, sir. Front! Show the gentleman to 1734." Five minutes later
Trencher, in an inner room on the seventeenth floor, with the door
locked on the inside, had sprung the catch of the brown suit case and
was spreading its contents out upon the bed, smiling his satisfaction as
he did so. Plainly fortune was favouring him at each new turning.

For here was a somewhat rumpled black suit and along with it a
blue-striped shirt, showing slight signs of recent wear, a turndown
collar that was barely soiled, and a plain black four-in-hand tie.
Trencher went through the pockets of the suit, finding several letters
addressed to Marcus K. Parker at an address in Broad Street, down in the
financial district. Sewn in the lining of the inner breast pocket of the
coat was a tailor's label also bearing the same name. At the sight
Trencher grinned. He had not missed it very far. He had registered as
Potter, whereas now he knew that the proper owner of the suit case must
be named Parker.

Parker, he figured, belonged to the race of commuters; evidently he
lived in Stamford and did business in New York. Accepting this as the
correct hypothesis the rest of the riddle was easy to read. Mr. Parker,
coming to town that morning, had brought with him his dinner rig in a
suit case.

Somewhere, probably at his office, he had changed from his everyday garb
to the clothes he brought with him, then he had packed his street
clothes into the bag and brought it uptown with him and checked it at
the Grand Central, intending after keeping his evening engagements to
reclaim the baggage before catching a late train for Stamford.

Fine! Results from Trencher's standpoint could hardly have been more
pleasing. Exulting inwardly over the present development and working
fast, he stripped off his clothing down to his shoes and his
undergarments--first, though, emptying his own pockets of the money they
contained, both bills and silver, and of sundry personal belongings,
such as a small pocketknife, a fountain pen, a condensed railway guide
and the slip of pasteboard that represented the hat and coat left behind
at the Clarenden. Then he put on the things that had come out of the
Stamford man's bag--the shirt, the collar and the tie, and finally the
outer garments, incidentally taking care to restore to Parker's coat
pocket all of Parker's letters.

This done he studied himself in the glass of the chiffonier and was
deeply pleased. Mirrored there he saw a different man from the one who
had rented the room. When he quit this hotel, as presently he meant to
do, he would not be Trencher, the notorious confidence man who had shot
a fellow crook, nor yet would he be the Thompson who had sent a darky
for a bag, nor the Tracy who had picked a guest's pocket at a
fashionable restaurant, nor yet the Potter who had engaged a room with
bath for a night. From overcoat and hat to shoes and undergarments he
would be Mr. Marcus K. Parker, a thoroughly respectable gentleman,
residing in the godly town of Stamford and engaged in reputable
mercantile pursuits in Broad Street--with opened mail in his pocket to
prove it.

The rest would be simplicity. He had merely to slip out of the hotel,
carrying the key to 1734 with him. Certainly it would be as late as noon
the following day before chambermaid or clerk tried to rouse the
supposed occupant of the empty room. In all likelihood it would be later
than noon. He would have at least twelve hours' start, even though the
authorities were nimble-witted enough to join up the smaller mystery of
an abandoned suit case belonging to one man and an abandoned outfit of
clothing belonging to another, with the greater and seemingly
unconnected mystery of the vanishment of the suspect in the Sonntag
homicide case. Long before this potential eventuality could by any
chance develop, he meant, under another name and in another disguise, to
be hidden away at a quiet boarding house that he knew of in a certain
obscure factory town on a certain trolley line leading out from
Pittsburgh.

Now to clear out. He bestowed in various pockets his money, his knife,
his pen and his railway guide, not one of these having upon it any
identifying marks; he pouched his small change and his roll of bills.
Nothing remained to be disposed of or accounted for save the pasteboard
square that represented the coat and hat left behind at the Clarenden.
When this had been torn into fine and indistinguishable bits and when as
a final precaution the fragments had been tossed out of the window, the
last possible evidence to link the pseudo Parker with the real Trencher
in this night's transactions would be gone.

He had the slip in his hands and his fingers were in the act of twisting
it in halves when the thought that something had been overlooked--something
vitally important--came to him; and he paused to cogitate. What had been
forgotten? What had he overlooked? What had he left undone that should
have been done? Then suddenly appreciation of the thing missing came to
him and in a quick panic of apprehension he felt through all the pockets
of Parker's suit and through the pockets of his own garments, where he
had flung them down on the bed, alongside the rifled suit case.

His luck piece was gone--that was it! The old silver trade dollar, worn
thin and smooth by years of handling and with the hole drilled through
the centre of it--that was what was gone--his token, his talisman, his
charm against evil fortune. He had carried it for years, ever since he
had turned crook, and for nothing in this world would he have parted
from it.

In a mounting flurry of superstitious terror he searched the pockets
again, with fingers that shook--this man who had lost faith in human
beings, who had no hope and no fear for the hereafter, who had felt no
stabs of regret or repentance for having killed a man, whose thoughts
had never known remorse for any misdeed of his. The second hunt and the
third and the fourth were fruitless as his first one had been;
Trencher's luck piece was gone.

Those wise men, the alienists, say that all of us are insane on certain
subjects, however sane we may be upon other subjects. Certainly in the
mental composition of every one of us is some quirk, some vagary, some
dear senseless delusion, avowed or private. As for Trencher, the one
crotchet in his cool brain centred about that worthless trade dollar.
With it in his possession he had counted himself a winner, always.
Without it he felt himself to be a creature predestined and foreordained
to disaster.

To it he gave all the credit for the fact that he had never served a
prison sentence. But once, and once only, had he parted company with it,
even temporarily. That was the time when Murtha, that crafty old
Central-Office hand, had picked him up on general principles, had taken
him to headquarters, and first stripping him of all the belongings on
his person, had carried him to the Bertillon Bureau, and then and there,
without shadow of legal right, since Trencher was neither formally
accused of nor formally indicted for any offence and had no previous
record of convictions, had forced him to undergo the ordeals, ethically
so repugnant to the instincts of the professional thief, of being
measured and finger-printed and photographed, side face and full face.
He had cursed and protested and pleaded when Murtha confiscated the
luck piece; he had rejoiced when Murtha, seeing no harm in the thing,
had restored it to him before lodging him in a cell under the
all-embracing technical charge of being a suspicious person. Because he
had so speedily got it back, Trencher had gone free again with the loss
of but two days of liberty--or anyway, so Trencher firmly believed. But
because it had left his custody for no more than an hour his pictures
were now in the Gallery, and Murtha had learned the secret of Trencher's
one temperamental weakness, one fetish.

And now--at this time, of all times--it was gone again. But where had it
gone? Where could it have gone? Mentally he reconstructed all his acts,
all his movements since he had risen that morning and dressed--and then
the solution came to him, and with the solution complete remembrance. He
had slipped it into the right-hand pocket of the new tan-coloured
topcoat--to impregnate the garment with good luck and to enhance the
prospects for a successful working-out of the scheme to despoil the
Wyoming cattleman; and he had left it there. And now here he was up on
the seventeenth floor of the Bellhaven Hotel and the fawn-coloured coat
with the luck piece in one of its pockets dangled on a hook in the cloak
booth of the Clarenden café, less than a block away from the spot where
he had shot Sonntag.

He marvelled that without his talisman he had escaped arrest up to now;
it was inconceivable that he had won his way thus far. But then the
answer to that was, of course, that he had retained the pasteboard
square that stood for possession of the coat itself. He gave thanks to
the unclean spirits of his superstition that apprehension of his loss
had come to him before he destroyed the slip. Had he gone ahead and torn
it up he would now count himself as doomed. But he hadn't torn it up.
There it lay on the white coverlet of the bed.

He must make a try to recover his luck piece; no other course occurred
to him. Trying would be beset with hazards, accumulated and thickening.
He must venture back into the dangerous territory; must dare deadfalls
and pitfalls; must run the chance of possible traps and probable nets.
By now the police might have definitely ascertained who it was that
killed Sonntag; or lacking the name of the slayer they might have
secured a reasonably complete description of him; might have spread the
general alarm for a man of such and such a height and such and such a
weight, with such a nose and such eyes and such hair and all the rest of
it. It might be that the Clarenden was being watched, along with the
other public resorts in the immediate vicinity of where the homicide had
been committed. It might even be that back in the Clarenden he would
encounter the real Parker face to face. Suppose Parker had finished his
supper and had discovered his loss--losses rather--and had made a
complaint to the management; and suppose as a result of Parker's
indignation that members of the uniformed force had been called in to
adjudicate the wrangle; suppose through sheer coincidence Parker should
see Trencher and should recognise the garments that Trencher wore as his
own. Suppose any one of a half dozen things. Nevertheless, he meant to
go back. He would take certain precautions--for all the need of haste,
he must take them--but he would go back.

He put the pink check into his waistcoat pocket, switched out the room
light, locked the door of the room on the outside, took the key with him
and went down in an elevator, taking care to avoid using the same
elevator that shortly before brought him up to this floor level.
Presently he was outside the hotel, hurrying afoot on his return to
Broadway. On the way he pitched the key into an areaway.

Turning out of Forty-second Street into Broadway and thence going south
to a point just below the intersection with Fortieth Street, he
approached the Clarenden from the opposite side of Broadway. There was
motive in this. One coming across from the opposite side and looking
upward at a diagonal slant could see through the windows along the front
side of the Clarenden with some prospect of making out the faces of such
diners as sat at tables near the windows. Straining his eyes as he
crossed over, Trencher thought he recognised his man. He was almost
sure he made out the outlined head and shoulders of Parker sitting at a
corner table alongside the last window in the row. He trusted he was
right and trusted still more fervently that Parker would bide where he
was for three or four minutes longer.

Tucking his head well down inside his upturned collar and giving the
brim of his hat a tug to bring it still farther forward over his eyes,
he took a long breath, like a man preparing for a dive in cold water,
and went up the flight of stairs from the sidewalk into the building. No
one inside made as if to halt him; no one so far as he could tell gave
him in passing even an impersonal look. There was a wash room, as
Trencher knew, at the back end of the ornate hall which separated the
Chinese lounge and the main café on one side, from the private dining
rooms and tea rooms on the other. That wash room was his present
destination.

He reached it without mishap, to find it deserted except for a boy in
buttons. To the boy he surrendered hat and overcoat, and then in the
midst of a feint at hitching up his shirt cuffs, as though meaning to
wash his hands, he snapped his fingers impatiently.

"I forgot something," he said for the boy's benefit; "left it in the
café. Say, kid, watch my hat and coat, will you? I'll be back in a
minute."

"Yes, sir," promised the youth. "I'll take good care of 'em."

Bareheaded as he now was and lacking the overcoat, Trencher realised the
chief elements of his disguise were missing; still there had been for
him no other course to follow than this risky one. He could not claim
ownership of one coat and one hat while wearing another coat and another
hat--that was certain. As he neared his goal he noted that both the
maids on the outside of the booth were for the instant engaged in
helping the members of a group of men and women on with their outdoor
wraps. So much the better for him. He headed straight for the third girl
of the force, the one whose station was within the open-fronted booth.
In front of her on the flat shelf intervening between them he laid down
the numbered pink slip, which in the scheme of his hopes and fears stood
for so much.

"Never mind my hat, miss," he said, making his tone casual; "I'm not
through with my supper yet. But just let me have my coat for one minute,
will you, please? I want to get something out of one of the pockets to
show to a friend."

There was nothing unusual, nothing unconventional about the request. The
girl glanced at the figures on the check, then stepped back into her
cuddy, seeking among rows of burdened hooks for whatsoever articles
would be on the hook bearing corresponding figures. To Trencher,
dreading the advent of the Stamford man out of the Chinese room
alongside him and yet not daring to turn his head to look, it seemed she
was a very long time finding the hook. In reality the time she took was
to be gauged by seconds rather than by minutes.

"Is this the garment you desired, sir?" Speaking with an affected
English drawl and with neither curiosity nor interest in her face, the
girl laid across her counter the tan-coloured overcoat, one of its big
smoked-pearl buttons glinting dimly iridescent in the light as she
spread it out.

"That's it, thank you. Just one moment and I'll give it back to you."

Trencher strove to throttle and succeeded fairly well in throttling the
eager note in his voice as he took up the coat by its collar in his left
hand.

The fingers trembled in spite of him as he thrust his right hand into
the right-hand pocket. Twitching and groping they closed on what was
hidden there--a slick, cool, round, flat, thin object, trade-dollar
size. At the touch of the thing he sought and for all, too, that he
stood in such perilous case, Trencher's heart jumped with relief and
gratification. No need for him to look to make sure that he had his luck
piece. He knew it by its feel and its heft and its size; besides the tip
of one finger, sliding over its smooth rimless surface, had found in the
centre of it the depression of the worn hole, and the sensitive nerves
had flashed the news to his brain. He slid it into a trousers pocket and
passed the coat back to the girl; and almost before she had restored it
to its appointed hook, Trencher had regained the shelter of the wash
room and was repossessing himself of the slouch hat and the long black
overcoat.

Back once more to the street he made the journey safely, nothing
happening on the way out into the November night to alarm him. The
winking, blinking electrically jewelled clock in the sign up the street
told him it was just five minutes past midnight. He headed north, but
for a few rods only. At Fortieth Street he turned west for a short block
and at Seventh Avenue he hailed a south-bound trolley car. But before
boarding the car he cast a quick backward scrutiny along the route he
had come. Cabs moved to and fro, shuttle fashion, but seemingly no
pedestrians were following behind him.

He was not particularly fearful of being pursued. Since he had cleared
out from the Clarenden without mishap it was scarcely to be figured that
anyone would or could now be shadowing him. He felt quite secure
again--as secure as he had felt while in the locked room in the
Bellhaven, because now he had in his custody that which gave him, in
double and triple measure, the sense of assurance. One hand was thrust
deep into his trousers pocket, where it caressed and fondled the flat
perforated disk that was there. It pleased him to feel the thing grow
warmer under his fingers, guaranteeing him against mischance. He did not
so much as twist his head to glance out of the car window as the car
passed Thirty-ninth Street.

At Thirtieth Street he got off the car and walked west to Silver's
place. Ninth Avenue was almost empty and, as compared with Broadway, lay
in deep shadows. The lights of the bar, filtering through the filmed
glass in one window of Silver's, made a yellowish blur in what was
otherwise a row of blank, dead house fronts. Above the saloon the
squatty three-story building was all dark, and from this circumstance
Trencher felt sure he had come to the rendezvous before the Kid arrived.
Alongside the saloon door he felt his way into a narrow entryway that
was as black as a coal bunker and went up a flight of wooden steps to
the second floor. At the head of the steps he fumbled with his hand
until he found a doorknob. As he knew, this door would not be locked
except from the inside; unless it contained occupants it was never
locked. He knew, too, what furniture it contained--one table and three
or four chairs. Steering a careful course to avoid bumping into the
table, which, as he recalled, should be in the middle of the floor, he
found the opposite wall and, after a moment's search with his hands, a
single electric bulb set in a wall bracket. He flipped on the light.

"That's right," said a voice behind him. "Now that you've got your mitts
up, keep 'em up!"

As regards the position of his hands Trencher obeyed. He turned his head
though, and over his shoulder he looked into the middle-aged face of
Murtha, of the Central Office. Murtha's right hand was in his coat
pocket and Trencher knew that Murtha had him covered--through the cloth
of the coat.

"Hello, Murtha," said Trencher steadily enough, "what's the idea?"

"The idea is for you to stand right where you are without making any
breaks until I get through frisking you," said Murtha.

On noiseless feet he stepped across the floor, Trencher's back being
still to him, and one of his hands, the left one, with deft movements
shifted about over Trencher's trunk, searching for a weapon.

"Got no gat on you, eh?" said Murtha. "Well, that's good. Now then,
bring your hands down slow, and keep 'em close together. That's
it--slow. I'm taking no chances, understand, and you'd better not take
any either."

Again Trencher obeyed. Still standing behind him Murtha slipped his arms
about Trencher's middle and found first one of Trencher's wrists and
then the other. There was a subdued clicking of steel mechanisms.

"Now then," said Murtha, falling back a pace or two, "I guess you can
turn round if you want to."

Trencher turned round. He glanced at his hands, held in enforced
companionship by the short chain of the handcuffs, and then steadily at
his captor.

"Why so fussy, Murtha?" he asked in a slightly contemptuous tone. "You
never heard of me starting any rough stuff when there was a pinch coming
off, did you?"

"That's true," said the detective; "but when a gun's just bumped off one
guy he's liable to get the habit of bumping off other guys. Even a swell
gun like you is. So that's why I've been just a trifle particular."

"You're crazy, man! Who says I bumped anybody off?"

"I do, for one," replied Murtha cheerfully. "Still that's neither here
nor there, unless you feel like telling me all about what came off over
in Thirty-ninth Street to-night.

"You've always been a safety player so far as I know--and I'm curious to
know what made you start in using a cannon on folks all of a sudden. At
that, I might guess--knowing Sonntag like I did."

"I don't know what you're talking about," parried Trencher. "I tell you
you've got me wrong. You can't frame me for something I didn't do. If
somebody fixed Sonntag it wasn't me. I haven't seen him since
yesterday. I'm giving it to you straight."

"Oh well, we won't argue that now," said Murtha affably. In his manner
was something suggestive of the cat that has caught the king of the
rats. A tremendous satisfaction radiated from him. "You can stall some
people, son, but you can't stall me. I've got you and I've got the goods
on you--that's sufficient. But before you and me glide down out of here
together and start for the front office I'd like to talk a little with
you. Set down, why don't you, and make yourself comfortable?" He
indicated a chair.

Trencher took the chair and Murtha, after springing a catch which he
found on the inner side of the door, sat down in another.

"I've got to hand it to you, Trencher," went on the detective
admiringly. "You sure do work swift. You didn't lose much time climbing
into that outfit you're wearing. How did you get into it so quick? And,
putting one thing with another, I judge you made a good fast get-away
too. Say, listen, Trencher, you might as well come clean with me. I'll
say this for Sonntag--he's been overdue for a croaking this long time.
If I've got to spare anybody out of my life I guess it might as well be
him--that's how I stand. He belonged to the Better-Dead Club to start
with, Sonntag did. If it was self-defence and you can prove it, I've got
no kick coming. All I want is the credit for nailing you all by my
lonesome. Why not slip me the whole tale now, and get it off your chest?
You don't crave for any of this here third-degree stuff down at
headquarters, and neither do I. Why not spill it to me now and save
trouble all round?"

His tone was persuasive, wheedling, half friendly. Trencher merely shook
his head, forcing a derisive grin to his lips.

"Can the bull, Murtha," he said. "You haven't got a thing on me and you
know it."

"Is that so? Well, just to play the game fair, suppose I tell you some
of the things I've got on you--some of them. But before I start I'm
going to tell you that your big mistake was in coming back to where
you'd left that nice new yellow overcoat of yours. Interested, eh?" he
said, reading the expression that came into Trencher's face in spite of
Trencher's efforts. "All right then, I'll go on. You had a good prospect
of getting out of town before daylight, but you chucked your chance when
you came back to the Clarenden a little while ago. But at that I was
expecting you; in fact, I don't mind telling you that I was standing
behind some curtains not fifteen feet from that check room when you
showed up. I could have grabbed you then, of course, but just between
you and me I didn't want to run the risk of having to split the credit
fifty-fifty with any bull, in harness or out of it, that might come
butting in. The neighbourhood was lousy with cops and plain-clothes men
hunting for whoever it was that bumped off Sonntag; they're still there,
I guess, hunting without knowing who it is they're looking for, and
without having a very good description of you, either. I was the only
fellow that had the right dope, and that came about more by accident
than anything else. So I took a chance, myself. I let you get away and
then I trailed you--in a taxi.

"All the time you was on that street car I was riding along right behind
you, and I came up these steps here not ten feet behind you. I wanted
you all for myself and I've got you all by myself."

"You don't hate yourself, exactly, do you?" said Trencher. "Well,
without admitting anything--because there's nothing to admit--I'd like
to know, if you don't mind, how you dope it out that I had anything to
do with Sonntag's being killed--that is if you're not lying about him
being killed?"