prisoner's
behaviour.

Walking between the pair to prevent further hostilities the policeman
took both men into the station master's office, his intention being to
telephone from there for a patrol wagon. The night station master
accompanied them. Inside the room, while the station master was
binding up the wound in the sweeper's forehead with a pocket
handkerchief, it occurred to the policeman that in the flurry of
excitement he had not found out the name of the tall and still excited
belligerent. The sweeper he already knew. He asked the tall man for
his name and business.

"My name," said the prisoner, "is Jason C. Mallard. I am a member of
Congress."

The station master forgot to make the knot in the bandage he was tying
about the sweeper's head. The sweeper forgot the pain of his new
headache and the blood which trickled down his face and fell upon the
front of his overalls. As though governed by the same set of wires
these two swung about, and with the officer they stared at the
stranger. And as they stared, recognition came into the eyes of all
three, and they marvelled that before now none of them had discerned
the identity of the owner of that splendid tousled head of hair and
those clean-cut features, now swollen and red with an unreasonable
choler. The policeman was the first to get his shocked and jostled
senses back, and the first to speak. He proved himself a quick-witted
person that night, this policeman did; and perhaps this helps to
explain why his superior, the head of the St. Louis police
department, on the very next day promoted him to be a sergeant.

But when he spoke it was not to Mallard but to the sweeper.

"Look here, Mel Harris," he said; "you call yourself a purty good
Amurican, don't you?"

"You bet your life I do!" was the answer. "Ain't I got a boy in camp
soldierin'?"

"Well, I got two there myself," said the policeman; "but that ain't
the question now. I see you've got a kind of a little bruised place
there on your head. Now then, as a good Amurican tryin' to do your
duty to your country at all times, I want you to tell me how you come
by that there bruise. Did somebody mebbe hit you, or as a matter of
fact ain't it the truth that you jest slipped on a piece of banana
peelin' or something of that nature, and fell up against the door jamb
of that lunch room out yonder?"

For a moment the sweeper stared at his interrogator, dazed. Then a
grin of appreciation bisected his homely