Presently a little, wizened, consumptive-looking drummer for a Connecticut shoe factory squeezed his way through the crowd on the opposite side of the street to have a peep at the desperado. He weighed about ninety pounds and wore double glass spectacles. Just then the desperado gave another whoop and yelled: "Gol darn ye, why don't some of ye come and take me? I'll eat any five of ye without chawin', and I ain't hungry either--whoopee!" The crowd fell back a few yards further and the police turned pale again, but the skinny little man adjusted his spectacles with both hands, and stepped on to the edge of the sidewalk and took a good look at the bad men. Then he deliberately struck across the street at a funny hopping kind of a run right up to where the terror stood. The crowd yelled at him to come back, and the desperado flourished his six-shooter again, but the little man went straight up to him and said something. The crowd shuddered and expected to see him fall with a forty-five bullet in him, but he didn't. They saw the desperado lower his pistol and run his hand in his pocket and hand something to the little man. Then the desperado walked sheepishly down the sidewalk, and the little man came back across the street. "Bad man?" he said. "I guess not. He wouldn't hurt a fly. That's Zeke Skinner. He was raised on the farm next to me in Connecticut. He's selling some kind of fake liver medicine, and that's his street rig he's got on now. I loaned him eight dollars in Hartford nine years ago, and never expected to see him again. Thought I knew his voice. Pay? I reckon he paid me. I calculate I always collect what's owing to me." Then the crowd scattered and the twelve policeman headed Zeke off at the next corner and clubbed him all the way to the station house. A Slight Mistake An ordinary-looking man wearing a last season's negligee shirt stepped into the business office and unrolled a strip of manuscript some three feet long. "I wanted to see you about this little thing I want to publish in the paper. There are fifteen verses besides the other reading matter. The verses are on spring. My handwriting is a trifle illegible and I may have to read it over to you. This is the way it runs:" Spring The air is full of gentle zephyrs, Grass is growing green; Winter now has surely left us. Spring has come, I ween. When the sun has set, the vapors Rise from out the meadows low; When the stars are lit like tapers Then the night winds chilly blow. "Take that stuff up to the editorial department," said the business manager shortly. "I have been up there already," said the ordinary-looking man, "and they sent me down here. This will fill about a column. I want to talk with you about the price. The last verse runs this way:" Then it is that weakening languors Thicken in our veins the blood And we must ward off these dangers Ere we find our names are "Mud."