There were delicate little keys with spidery legs which Tim looked at with great admiration, and loved more than he had ever loved his wife and all his relations. There were also complicated wrenching implements, with horror latent about them, as though they had come from some big arm-chaired, red-glassed dental surgery. Tim Kelly was putting his tools to rights, and Cleg watched him intently, for he also was a conspirator. At midday the boy vanished and reported himself at the police-sergeant's. He asked for a "piece," and the sergeant's wife told him to be off. She was busy and he might come back when the weans came in for their dinners. She had not time to be always giving the likes of him "pieces" in the middle of the day. Cleg did not care. He was not particularly hungry. But he hung about all afternoon in the neighbourhood of the police-station, and so pestered the good-natured policemen off duty, that one of them threatened him with "a rare belting" if he did not quit. Whereupon Cleg buttoned up his jacket, made to himself a paper helmet, and with a truncheon in his hand stalked about in front of the station, taking up stray dogs in the name of the law. One of these he had previously taught to walk upon its hind legs. This animal he arrested, handcuffed with a twist of wire, and paraded over against the station in a manner killingly comic—much to the amusement of the passers-by, as well as detrimental to the sobriety and discipline of the younger officers themselves. But Cleg was seldom meddled with by the police. He was under the protection of the sergeant's wife, who so often gave him a "piece." She also gave "pieces" sometimes to the officers at the station-house. For according as a policeman is fed, so is he. And it was the sergeant's wife who stirred the porridge pot. Therefore Cleg was left alone. In this manner Cleg amused himself till dark, when he stole home. His father was already coming down the stairs. Cleg rapidly withdrew. His father passed out and took the narrowest lanes southward till he entered the Queen's Park under the immanent gloom of the Salisbury Crags. Cleg followed like his shadow. Tim Kelly often looked behind. He boasted that he could hear the tramp of the regulation police boot at least half a mile, and tell it from the tread of a circus elephant, and even from the one o'clock gun at the Castle. But he saw no silent boy tracking him noiselessly after the fashion of the Indian scout, so vividly described in the "Bully Boys' Journal."