He ran up the steps to 211. After a long period, the door opened. It was the mother. Briefly Lanagan explained what had happened. The poor old toothless soul was about past being shocked further. But quickly Lanagan, in that compelling way of his, calmed her fears. He promised that she would have her son and daughter back--before daylight. _Before daylight!_ It fairly took my breath away. “What is it, Jack? Give me a line,” I demanded in excitement. “Heavens, man, it’s quarter to two! How are you going to get a story in the paper to-night now? You’ll only break it for all the papers.” Lanagan stopped short in his rapid walk and laid his hand on my shoulders. “I’ve been in this game fifteen years, Norrie,” he said, with a solemnity new in him. “Let me tell you something, and I say it who have the right: there comes a time just once every so often when a newspaper man puts humanity above his paper. Remember that. You are betraying no trust with your paper when you do; you are betraying your trust with yourself, with your fellow man, and with your conscience when you do not. This is one of them.” That was all. But many times in the years that have whirled by since then and since that strange, marvellous man passed out of the newspaper life of the west, have those words come back out of the dark of a back alley, to guide me. He was not working for an “exclusive” now; he was working to free a mite of a cripple girl and her stunned and misused brother from the inner tier of cells at the city prison. He said no more. At Market Street he flung open a taxicab door and we jumped in. He called an address to the driver. It was Chief Leslie’s home. We were there within fifteen minutes. Lanagan held his finger on the button until the door swung open and the Chief himself appeared, wrapped in a lounging robe, his hair tousled, his beard rumpled, but his grey eyes wide and alert. Lanagan brushed in and I after him. He sat the Chief down on a settee and for ten minutes he hammered away. At last Leslie’s fist banged the settee arm. “By the Lord Harry, you’re right! And I want to flash that bird again! It all comes back to me now; I couldn’t make out the other day where I had seen him before. Little stouter, but same man or I’ll cut my throat!” He took the stairs to the next floor three at a time. Within five minutes he was back, fully dressed. “Got your machine out here yet?” “Yes,” said Lanagan. “But don’t forget the Wards.” Leslie stepped to the telephone stand and to his private line to headquarters.