the man of affairs who was speaking. "I
will see Rosenthal at once, and then send for your nurse. Give me her
address."

When he had written it, he stepped to the foot of the stairs, and called
to one of the guards. Then he slipped his hand under his cassock, drew
out his watch, noted the hour, and in a firm voice--one intended to be
obeyed--said:

"Go back into your cell and sit there until I come. Do not worry if I
am away longer than I expect, and do not be frightened when the key is
turned on you. It is best that you be locked up for a while. You should
give thanks to God, my dear woman, that I have found you."

Chapter XXI

The news of Mike's arrest had been received by kitty's neighbors
with varying degrees of indifference. Everybody realized that, as the
run-over boy had lost nothing but his breath--and but little of that,
judging from his vigorous howl when Mike picked him up--nothing would
come of the affair so long as the present captain ruled the precinct.
Kitty and John and all who belonged to them were too popular around the
station; too many of the boys had slipped in and slipped out of a cold
night, warmed up by the contents of her coffee-pot.

Indeed, between the captain and the denizens of "The Avenue," only the
most friendly, amicable, and delightful personal relations prevailed. To
the habitual criminal, the sneak-thief, and the hold-up, he might be
a mailed despot swinging a mailed fist, but to the occasional "Monday
drunk," or the man who had had the best or the worst of it in a fight,
or to one like Mike who was the victim of an unavoidable accident,
he was only a heathen idol of justice behind which sat a big-waisted,
tightly belted man whose wife and daughters everybody knew as he himself
knew everybody in return; who belonged to the same lodge, played poker
in the same up-stairs room when off duty, and was as tender-hearted in
time of trouble as any one of their other acquaintances. Not to have
allowed Mike, a man he knew, a man who had been Kitty and John's driver
for years, to hunt up his own bond, would have been as unwise and
impossible as his releasing a burglar on straw bail, or a murderer
because the dead man could not make a complaint.

When, therefore, Mike burst into the kitchen with the additional
information that "the cap" had let him go to bring back the wagon and
somebody with "cash" enough to go bail, a general movement, headed by
Tim Kelsey, who happened to be p