r!"

Joe looked at him gravely. "My dear sir," he returned, "you speak to
me with the familiarity of an old friend."

The clerk did not recover so far as to be capable of repartee until Joe
had entered his own stairway. Then, with a bitter sneer, he seized a
bad potato from an open barrel and threw it at the mongrel, who had
paused to examine the landscape. The missile failed, and
Respectability, after bestowing a slightly injured look upon the clerk,
followed his master.

In the office the red-bearded man sat waiting. Not so red-bearded as of
yore, however, was Mr. Sheehan, but grizzled and gray, and, this
morning, gray of face, too, as he sat, perspiring and anxious, wiping a
troubled brow with a black silk handkerchief.

"Here's the devil and all to pay at last, Joe," he said, uneasily, on
the other's entrance. "This is the worst I ever knew; and I hate to
say it, but I doubt yer pullin' it off."

"I've got to, Mike."

"I hope on my soul there's a chanst of it! I like the little man, Joe."

"So do I."

"I know ye do, my boy. But here's this Tocsin kickin' up the public
sentiment; and if there ever was a follerin' sheep on earth, it's that
same public sentiment!"

"If it weren't for that"--Joe flung himself heavily in a
chair--"there'd not be so much trouble. It's a clear enough case."

"But don't ye see," interrupted Sheehan, "the Tocsin's tried it and
convicted him aforehand? And that if things keep goin' the way they've
started to-day, the gran' jury's bound to indict him, and the trial
jury to convict him? They wouldn't dare not to! What's more, they'll
want to! And they'll rush the trial, summer or no summer, and--"

"I know, I know."

"I'll tell ye one thing," said the other, wiping his forehead with the
black handkerchief, "and that's this, my boy: last night's business has
just about put the cap on the Beach fer me. I'm sick of it and I'm
tired of it! I'm ready to quit, sir!"

Joe looked at him sharply. "Don't you think my old notion of what
might be done could be made to pay?"

Sheehan laughed. "Whoo! You and yer hints, Joe! How long past have
ye come around me with 'em! 'I b'lieve ye c'd make more money,
Mike'--that's the way ye'd put it,--'if ye altered the Beach a bit.
Make a little country-side restaurant of it,' ye'd say, 'and have good
cookin', and keep the boys and girls from raisin' so much hell out
there. Soon ye'd have other people comin' beside the regular crowd.