r once; but the
second time she borrowed some carbolic acid, which is more expeditious
than any ambulance surgeon.

This was the story which "Kitty the Cutie," while sticking close to the
facts, had contrived to inform with a woman's wrath and a woman's pity.
Reading it, Hal took fire. He determined to back it up with an
editorial. But first he would look into the matter for himself. With
this end in view he set out for Number 65 Sperry Street, where Maggie
Breen's younger sister and bedridden mother lived. It was his maiden
essay at reporting.

Sperry Street shocked Hal. He could not have conceived that a carefully
regulated and well-kept city such as Worthington (he knew it, be it
remembered, chiefly from above the wheels of an automobile) would permit
such a slum to exist. On either side of the street, gaunt wooden
barracks, fire-traps at a glance, reared themselves five rackety stories
upward, for the length of a block. Across intersecting Grant Street the
sky-line dropped a few yards, showing ragged through the metal cornice
and sickly brick chimneys of a tenement row only a degree less
forbidding than the first. The street itself was a mere refuse patch
smeared out over bumpy cobbles. The visitor entered the tenement at 65,
between reeking barrels which had waited overlong for the garbage cart.

He was received without question, as a reporter for the "Clarion." At
first Sadie Breen, anaemic, hopeless-eyed, timorous, was reluctant to
speak. But the mother proved Hal's ally.

"Let 'im put it in the paper," she exhorted. "Maybe it'll keep some
other girl away from them sharks."

"Why didn't your sister sue the company?" asked Hal.

"Where'd we get the money for a lawyer?" whined Sadie.

"It's no use, anyway," said Mrs. Breen. "They've tried it in Municipal
Court. The sharks always wins. Somebody ought to shoot that manager,"
she added fiercely.

"Yes; that's great to say," jeered Sadie, in a whine. "But look what
happened to that Mason girl from Hoppers Hollow. She hit at him with a
pair of scissors, an' they sent her up for a year."

"Better that than Cissy Green's way. You know what become of her. Went
on the street," explained Mrs. Breen to Hal.

They poured out story after story of poor women entrapped by one or
another of those lures which wring the final drop of blood from the
bleakest poverty. In the midst of the recital there was a knock at the
door, and a tall young man in black entered. He at on