"Who's your friend?" he asked with a sneer. It was Wringman, who having finished his labors for the day in proving to famished strikers how much better off they were than formerly, was now refreshing himself in one of his favorite haunts, at his favorite occupation. Talman stopped and looked at him quietly, then he said: "That man up there"--with his thumb over his shoulder he pointed toward the bar--"that man there has been a friend of mine in the past and he can ask me questions that I don't allow folks like you to ask me. See? I have known a man to git his neck broke by buttin' too hard into other folks' business. See?" Wringman, with an oath, started to get out of his chair, but his companions held him down, imploring him to be quiet, and the next moment the big bouncer from the bar was standing beside the table, and after a word with him Talman made his way through the crowd and walked out of the door. The bar-keeper beckoned to his bouncer and the two held a muttered conference at the end of the bar. "He's gittin' too big for his breeches," said the bar-keeper as he turned away. "He'll git back there if he fools with me and pretty quick too." XXXI JOHN MARVEL'S RAID Had any one of the many detectives who were engaged in all sorts of work, legitimate and otherwise, in the limits of that great city, been watching among the half-sodden group of loafers and night-walkers who straggled through the side street on which opened the "Ladies' Entrance" of Mr. Gallagin's establishment along toward the morning hours, he might have seen a young woman brought from the door of the "ladies' entrance," supported by two persons, one a man and one a woman, and bodily lifted into a disreputable looking hack of the type known as a "night-hawk," while the dingy passers-by laughed among themselves and discussed how much it had taken to get the young woman as drunk as that. But there was no detective or other officer on that street at that hour, and but for the fact that a short, squatty man, nursing a grievance against an old pal of his, and turning over in his mind the unexpected kindness of a young woman and a threadbare preacher in an hour when all the rest of the world--even his pals in iniquity--appeared to have turned against him, was walking through the street with a dim idea of beginning a quarrel with the man who had deserted him, the destination of the drunken woman might never have been known. Red Talman's heart, however, callous as it was, foul with crimes too many and black to catalogue, had one single spot into which any light or feeling could penetrate. This was the secret corner, sacred to the thought of his one child, a little girl who alone of all the world truly thought him a good man. For John Marvel, who had helped his wife and child when he lay in prison under long sentence, and had been kind to him, he entertained a kindly feeling, but for the young lady who had taken his little girl and taught