Sammy's father shrugged his shoulders. "I don't see how what you say has anything to do with what my son said," he demurred. "Sammy looks user more than five and what harm is there in saving $15 if--" Sammy interrupted with a wail. "I won't go," he cried. "No, if I gotta tell the conductor I'm under five I better stay home. I don't wanna go. He'll know I'm 'leven going on twelve." "All right, all right," sighed Sammy's father. "But you see," he added, turning to Mishkin, "it ain't on account of wanting to have a minyon that my son has such high ideas." SOCIABLE GAMBLERS "Yes, it do interfere with their game," said Bill Cochran, the deputy sheriff from Tom Freeman's office. He cut himself a slice of chewing tobacco and glanced meditatively out of the window of the Dearborn Street bastile. Whereat he repeated with gentle emphasis, "It do." A long rain was leaning against the walls of the county jail. A dismal yellowish gloom drifted up and down the street. Deputy Cochran, with an effort, detached his eye from the lugubrious scene of the rain and the day-dark and spoke up brightly. "But at that," said he, "I don't think their being doomed for to hang can be held entirely responsible for their losing. You see, I've made quite a study of the game o' rhummy, not to mention pinochle and other such games of chance, and if I do say so myself I doubt there's the man in Chicago, doomed for to hang or otherwise, who would find me an easy mark. Still, as I say, in the case of these gentlemen who you refer to--to wit, the doomed men as I have acted as death watch for--it do interfere with their game. There's no denying that." * * * * * Now the rain chattered darkly on the grated windows of the Dearborn Street bastile and Deputy Cochran tilted back in his chair and thought pensively and in silence of life and death and high, low, jack and the game. "They pick me out for the death watch on account I have a way with doomed men," he remarked at last, his voice modestly self-conscious. "Some of the deputies is inclined to get a bit sad, you know. Or to let their nerves go away with them. But me, I feel as the best thing to do in the crisis to which I refer is to make the best of it. "So when I sit in on the death watch I faces myself with the truth. I says to myself right away: 'Bill, this young feller here is to be hanged by the neck until dead, in a few hours. Which being the case, there's no use wasting any more time or thought on the matter.' So after this self-communication, I usually says to the young feller under observation by the death watch, 'Cheerio, m'lad. Is there anything in particular as you'd like to discuss.'