before."

"Go on, you shyster!"

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."