Now, as every one who is familiar with the town of which Old Sheddon is an over-the-river part knows, the _Chronicle_ Building is well up the hill on the left-hand side of the main street, not quite out of the business district, but well over in the edge of it farthest from the river. Turning west at the newspaper corner, Larry glanced up at the clock in the dome of the court-house. Its hands were pointing to eleven. At the moment the streets were nearly deserted, though in the “booze block,” as a certain square well down toward the river was called, the saloons (now happily a thing of the past) were all open and doing, or so it seemed to Larry, an unusual amount of late-hour business. Since he passed that way nearly every evening on his way to and from the _Micrometer_ office, he went on toward the bridge without paying any attention either to the lighted dives on one hand, or to the groups of late-hour loafers cluttering the sidewalk on the other. But just as he was passing the last of the saloons a man stepped out of a group of three, followed him and touched him on the shoulder. Larry wheeled quickly, with his muscles hardening themselves; but the man, a rather burglarish-looking fellow with a week-old beard blackening the lower half of his face and a workman’s cap pulled well down over a pair of beady eyes, spoke him fair, as they used to say in our grandfathers’ time. “Name’s Donovan, ain’t it?” said the man, shifting the stub of his cigar from one corner of his hard mouth to the other, and talking out of the corner thus vacated. “It is,” said Larry briefly. Then, quite as briefly, “What do you want?” The man ignored the question. “Young fellow named Maxwell’s a pal o’ yours, ain’t he?” “He’s my friend, yes. What about him?” “Li’l’ too much bug-juice, I reckon,” was the half-leering reply. “Somebody ought to knock ’im down an’ run ’im off home. Thought mebbe youse’d like to know.” Most naturally, Larry was just plain horrified. That Dick, after his one bad slip and narrow escape, should make another that was infinitely worse, seemed utterly unbelievable. Then he remembered that for the past few days Dick had been blue and discouraged for fear that, after all, he mightn’t be able to make passing grades in the year-end examinations. Could it be possible that he had let his discouragement, which, as everybody had told him, was nothing worse than the nervous scare of a fellow who has been working his brain a bit too hard, drive him into another kind of dissipation? All this, as we may figure, flashed through one half of Larry’s mind in the few seconds during which he stood staring at the slouching bearer of bad news and trying, with the other half of the thinking machinery, to determine what possible object the man could have in lying to him――if he were lying. “You must be mistaken,” he said at last. “The Maxwell you’re talking about isn’t the Maxwell I know.”