en crawl into his bunk. I knew better than to run to a guard
for assistance. What was a man with a fit, anyway?

In the adjoining cell lived a strange character--a man who was doing
sixty days for eating swill out of Barnum's swill-barrel, or at least
that was the way he put it. He was a badly addled creature, and, at
first, very mild and gentle. The facts of his case were as he had
stated them. He had strayed out to the circus ground, and, being
hungry, had made his way to the barrel that contained the refuse from
the table of the circus people. "And it was good bread," he often
assured me; "and the meat was out of sight." A policeman had seen him
and arrested him, and there he was.

Once I passed his cell with a piece of stiff thin wire in my hand. He
asked me for it so earnestly that I passed it through the bars to him.
Promptly, and with no tool but his fingers, he broke it into short
lengths and twisted them into half a dozen very creditable safety
pins. He sharpened the points on the stone floor. Thereafter I did
quite a trade in safety pins. I furnished the raw material and peddled
the finished product, and he did the work. As wages, I paid him extra
rations of bread, and once in a while a chunk of meat or a piece of
soup-bone with some marrow inside.

But his imprisonment told on him, and he grew violent day by day. The
hall-men took delight in teasing him. They filled his weak brain with
stories of a great fortune that had been left him. It was in order to
rob him of it that he had been arrested and sent to jail. Of course,
as he himself knew, there was no law against eating out of a barrel.
Therefore he was wrongly imprisoned. It was a plot to deprive him of
his fortune.

The first I knew of it, I heard the hall-men laughing about the string
they had given him. Next he held a serious conference with me, in
which he told me of his millions and the plot to deprive him of them,
and in which he appointed me his detective. I did my best to let him
down gently, speaking vaguely of a mistake, and that it was another
man with a similar name who was the rightful heir. I left him quite
cooled down; but I couldn't keep the hall-men away from him, and they
continued to string him worse than ever. In the end, after a most
violent scene, he threw me down, revoked my private detectiveship, and
went on strike. My trade in safety pins ceased. He refused to make any
more safety pins, and he peppered me with raw material thr