I wondered what had become of Hostetter. Apparently he had cleared out when he saw his chance friend getting into trouble. Perhaps he thought I had been working with our smooth acquaintance all along. Then I thought what a fool I had been to give my real name and home to the desk-sergeant. To-morrow the wise ones down in Jasonville would be calling Van Harrington bad names all over again, and thinking how clever they had been. Some bad-smelling mess was shoved at me for supper, but I had no stomach for food, good or bad. The jail quieted down after a time, but I couldn't sleep. My mind was full of the past, of everything that had happened to me from the beginning. Only forty-eight hours before I had been tramping my way into the city, as keen as a hungry steer for all the glory I saw there ahead of me under the bank of smoke that was Chicago. Boylike, I had looked up at the big packing-houses, the factories, the tall elevators that I passed, and thought how one day I should be building my fortune out of them as others had built theirs before me. And the end of that boyish dream was this bed in a jail! * * * * * The next morning they hustled us all into court. I was crowded into the pen along with some of the numerous Smiths and Joneses who hadn't been able to secure bail the night before. These were disposed of first in the way of routine business, together with a few drunks and disorderlies. There were also in the pen some sickly-looking fellows who had been taken up for smoking opium in a Chinese cellar, a woman in whose house there had been a robbery, and a well-dressed man with a bandage over one eye. He must have been my neighbor of the bad head. The court room was pretty well jammed with these prisoners, the police officers, and a few loafers. The air smelled like a sewer, and the windows were foul with dirt. The judge was a good-looking, youngish man, with a curling black mustache, and he wore a diamond-studded circlet around his necktie. Behind the judge on the platform sat the young woman whose purse I was accused of stealing, and her father. She saw me when I was brought into the pen, but tried not to let me know it, looking away all the time. When I arrived on the scene the judge was administering an oath to a seedy-looking man, who kissed eagerly the filthy Bible and began to mumble something in a hurry to the judge. "Yes, I know that pipe dream," his Honor interrupted pleasantly. "Now, tell me the straight story of what you have been doing since you were here last week." "You insult me, Judge," the prisoner replied haughtily. "I'm an educated man, a graduate of a great institution of learning. You know your Horace, Judge?" "Not so well as the revised statutes of the state of Illinois," his Honor snapped back with what I thought was a lack of respect for learning. "Two months. Next!" "Why, Judge--"