“Now whut in the divil could he be a wantin’ wid Buck an’ Sammie?” she muttered to herself. “All that story ’bout his bein’ Mikky was puttin’ it on my eye, I’ll giv warnin’ to Sammie this night, an’ ef Buck’s in these pairts he better git out west some’res. The _po_lice uv got onto ’im. But hoiwiver did they know he knowed Mikky? Poor little angel Mikky! I guv him the shtraight about Bobs an’ Jimmie, fer they wuz beyant his troublin’ but he’ll niver foind Sammie from the directin’ I sayed.” Michael, sorrowing, horror-filled, conscience-stricken, took his way to a restaurant and ate his dinner, thinking meanwhile what he could do for the boys. Could he perhaps visit Jimmie in prison and make his life more comfortable in little ways? Could he plan something for him when he should come out? Could he help Sam? The old woman had said little about Sam’s condition. Michael thought he might likely by this time have built up a nice little business for himself. Perhaps he had a prosperous news stand in some frequented place. He looked forward eagerly to meeting him again. Sam had always been a silent child dependent on the rest, but he was one of the little gang and Michael’s heart warmed toward his former comrade. It could not be that he would find him so loathsome and repulsive as the old woman Sal. She made him heart-sick. Just to think of drinking soup from her dirty kettle! How could he have done it? And yet, he knew no better life then, and he was hungry, and a little child. So Michael mused, and all the time with a great heart-hunger to know what had become of Buck. Could he and Sam together plan some way to find Buck and help him out of his trouble? How could Buck have done anything so dreadful? And yet even as he thought it he remembered that “pinching” had not been a crime in his childhood days, not unless one was found out. How had these principles, or lack of principles been replaced gradually in his own life without his realizing it at all? It was all strange and wonderful. Practically now he, Michael, had been made into a new creature since he left New York, and so gradually, and pleasantly that he had not at all realized the change that was going on in him. Yet as he thought and marvelled there shot through him a thought like a pang, that perhaps after all it had not been a good thing, this making him into a new creature, with new desires and aims and hopes that could never be fulfilled. Perhaps he would have been happier, better off, if he had never been taken out of that environment and brought to appreciate so keenly another one where he did not belong, and could never stay, since this old environment was the one where he must stay whether he would or no. He put the thought from him as unworthy at once, yet the sharpness of the pang lingered and with it a vision of Starr’s vivid face as he had seen her two nights before in her father’s home, before he knew that the door of that home was shut upon him forever.