“Do you make them?” he asked, triumphantly. I nodded. The jewels unquestionably answered the description of those stolen from the Robbins home. It came to me like a physical blow, the shock that such a frail, broken bit of humanity as the little back alley waif before me was entangled in a thieves’ gang. I knew she was the suspect’s sister. She still held her defiant place against the house. “I guess this time, young lady, you will go in,” said Thomas, tersely. “Do you want anything from the house? Got any thing to say? You are going to jail.” She began to tremble violently, but her lips were still compressed. “No,” she managed to say at last. “No! I was watching! I know now! I know! But I will not talk to you! Please don’t waken my mamma or my little brothers--let us go--now--if I must.” She started to hobble away in feverish haste, shaken with sobs that she would not permit to escape her lips. Seldom have I been affected with such a sense of sadness as came over me then: all of the tragedy that would have been in the situation with even a whole girl under such circumstances was doubled by her condition. “Got her dead to rights that time,” chuckled Thomas to me. “She’ll spill now sure. The rest of the stuff must be cached around here somewhere.” “You think there is no question about the Ward boy?” I asked. “Not the slightest. And she is in and is covering up. They’re all crooked, these back alley rats. There’s more in the gang, of course. That stuff was put there, I suppose, to-night, for her to ‘shove.’ Probably she peddles it. You never can tell how these gangs operate.” I glanced again at the pitiable little misshapen thing dragged away from her home to a cell and an iron bed at the city prison and I couldn’t trust myself to reply to Thomas. By a curious change that is gradually making me less valuable as a newspaper man the older I become in the business, I find myself unconsciously taking sides against my paper with fellow beings whose frailties or sorrows make them grist for the newspaper mill. I felt so toward this poor girl now, a victim of congenital influence in all likelihood; obviously a product of the malnutrition of the under classes. Thomas took his prisoner away in a taxi and I hurried to a telephone and gave the story to Sampson in that fashion. I then hastened back to Clementina Street, where to my great relief, I was picked up by Lanagan within a few moments. I related everything to him. When I had finished his eyes shone more brightly than the gas jet over our heads. Never had I beheld him so far from the composure for which he was noted. For a minute or two he anathematised O’Rourke by all the carded oaths and a few that he invented. “Back, back in jail, is she! So, O’Rourke couldn’t take my word! We’ll see, oh, we’ll see! Wait.”