The sheer impudence of it took my breath away for a moment, and with the sudden natural impulse of a sporting chance for the hunted thing, I stood on the accelerator and whisked around a corner and out of sight before it came home to me that I was probably defeating the ends of justice. Then, too, there had been a quality of warmth and a hint of laughter in the rich brogue of the speaker that appealed to me and seemed to lift him out of the common run of malefactors. Once committed, however, I turned a lot more corners and put a good bit of the city between us and his pursuers before I pulled into the curb and turned to have it out with my “fare.” He forestalled me. He jumped to his feet at once. “Do but wait now, sor, and lave me have a look at ye!” said he. Surprise and wrathful amazement kept me silent for a moment while he stared into my face. Then just as I was preparing to give him an extensive and unvarnished account of what I thought of him and his impudence, he slapped his thigh, and leaning forward took my hand and touched the top of his head with it, in a queer old-fashioned gesture. “Faith, sor, I knew ut! You’re the man for me and I’m your man from this day forth. See now, tell me what it is you want in the world and I’ll get it ye. Ye have the look of a seeker, sor. Tell me what it is ye seek and I’ll find it. There now!” I could not answer for a moment. The beggar was so impudent and so amazingly penetrating. Then I recovered my tongue and proceeded to give him a dressing down that I’m proud of even now, when I think of it. He listened without a word and with only an occasional wriggle of the body to show that some comment of mine upon his personal appearance had gone home. I wound up with the observation that I now proposed to take him and hand him over to the nearest policeman with a full account of our meeting. “That’s it, sor!” he broke in, as I finished, “you’re the master for a lawless lad like me. I knew it from the fir-r-rst. An’ ye’ll not be for givin’ me up to thim cops at the latter end, afther the way ye’d made such a rescue an’ all. Faith, ’twas a small matther av a colleen av wan av thim gangsters, sor!” He paused and looked at me with something of anxiety in his eyes. “See now, give me up to thim thin if ye must, sor. Thim bhoys is nothin’ an’ I’ll soon be quit of the pack of thim again. But ye’ll not be the sort that’s met with every day. An’—an’ I’d like fine to serve ye, sor!”