arrested for wholesale kidnappin'. There's a general alarm out for
youse."

"Ah, back to the goats!" says I. "You don't think we look nutty enough
to steal a whole orphan asylum, do you, Rounds?"

"I wouldn't trust either of you alone with a brick block," says he. "And
your side partner with the Salvation Army coat on looks like a yegg man
to me."

"Now will you be nice, Cap?" says I.

At this Sadie and Mrs. Cubbs tries to butt in, but that roundsman had a
head like a choppin' block. He said the two nurses had come to town and
reported that they'd been held up in the woods and that all the kids had
been swiped. As Woodie fitted one of the descriptions, we had to go to
the station, that was all there was about it.

And say, if the Sarge hadn't happened to have been one of my old
backers, we'd have put in the night with the drunk and disorderlies.
Course, when I tells me little tale, the Sarge give me the ha-ha and
scratches our names off the book. We didn't lose any time either, in
hittin' the Studio, where there was a hot bath and dry towels.

But paste this in your Panama: Next time me and Woodie goes out to
rescue the fatherless, we takes along our raincoats. We've shook hands
on that.

CHAPTER XIII

How's Woodie and Sadie comin' on? Ah, say! you don't want to take the
things she does too serious. It's got to be a real live one that
interests Sadie. And, anyway, Woodie's willing to take oath that she put
up a job on him. So it's all off.

And I guess I ain't so popular with her as I might be. Anyway, I
wouldn't blame her, after the exhibition I made the other night, for
classin' me with the phonies. It was trouble I hunted up all by myself.

Say, if I hadn't been havin' a dopey streak I'd a known something was
about due. There hadn't a thing happened to me for more'n a week, when
Pinckney blows into the Studio one mornin', just casual like, as if he'd
only come in 'cause he found the door open. That should have put me
leary, but it didn't. I gives him the hail, and tells him, he's lookin'
like a pink just off the ice.

"Shorty," says he, "how are you on charity?"

"I'm a cinch," says I. "Every panhandler north of Madison Square knows
he can work me for a beer check any time he can run me down."

"Then you'll be glad to exercise your talents in aid of a worthy cause,"
says he.

"It don't follow," says I. "The deservin' poor I passes up. There's too
much done for 'em, as it is. It's the unwort