The clerk did not recover so far as to be capable of repartee until Joe had entered his own stairway. Then, with a bitter sneer, he seized a bad potato from an open barrel and threw it at the mongrel, who had paused to examine the landscape. The missile failed, and Respectability, after bestowing a slightly injured look upon the clerk, followed his master. In the office the red-bearded man sat waiting. Not so red-bearded as of yore, however, was Mr. Sheehan, but grizzled and gray, and, this morning, gray of face, too, as he sat, perspiring and anxious, wiping a troubled brow with a black silk handkerchief. "Here's the devil and all to pay at last, Joe," he said, uneasily, on the other's entrance. "This is the worst I ever knew; and I hate to say it, but I doubt yer pullin' it off." "I've got to, Mike." "I hope on my soul there's a chanst of it! I like the little man, Joe." "So do I." "I know ye do, my boy. But here's this Tocsin kickin' up the public sentiment; and if there ever was a follerin' sheep on earth, it's that same public sentiment!" "If it weren't for that"--Joe flung himself heavily in a chair--"there'd not be so much trouble. It's a clear enough case." "But don't ye see," interrupted Sheehan, "the Tocsin's tried it and convicted him aforehand? And that if things keep goin' the way they've started to-day, the gran' jury's bound to indict him, and the trial jury to convict him? They wouldn't dare not to! What's more, they'll want to! And they'll rush the trial, summer or no summer, and--" "I know, I know." "I'll tell ye one thing," said the other, wiping his forehead with the black handkerchief, "and that's this, my boy: last night's business has just about put the cap on the Beach fer me. I'm sick of it and I'm tired of it! I'm ready to quit, sir!" Joe looked at him sharply. "Don't you think my old notion of what might be done could be made to pay?" Sheehan laughed. "Whoo! You and yer hints, Joe! How long past have ye come around me with 'em! 'I b'lieve ye c'd make more money, Mike'--that's the way ye'd put it,--'if ye altered the Beach a bit. Make a little country-side restaurant of it,' ye'd say, 'and have good cookin', and keep the boys and girls from raisin' so much hell out there. Soon ye'd have other people comin' beside the regular crowd. Make a little garden on the shore, and let 'em eat at tables under trees an' grape-arbors--'" "Well, why not?" asked Joe. "Haven't I been tellin' ye I'm thinkin' of it? It's only yer way of hintin' that's funny to me,--yer way of sayin' I'd make more money, because ye're afraid of preachin' at any of us: partly because ye know the little good it 'd be, and partly because ye have humor. Well, I'm thinkin' ye'll git yer way. I'M willin' to go into the missionary business with ye!" "Mike!" said Joe, angrily, but he grew very red and failed to meet the other's eye, "I'm not--"