The man hesitated, and his glance savoured of repressed truculence. "Maybe I do, once in a while," he replied doggedly. "I ain't on trial here, am I?" "No--not just now." The judge spoke almost gently. "Stand down and let the fellow who _is_ on trial take that chair." The child with the sullen face slouched forward, and the Judge's eyes engaged his smouldering young pupil's with less austerity perhaps than the description of his turpitude warranted. This man, who sat one day a week to try the cases of delinquent and incorrigible children, presided five days over more mature hearings. From Monday through Thursday he mantled himself in judicial dignity and his language was the decorous speech of the bench. One who observed him only on Friday would hardly have gathered that. Just now he leaned forward and addressed the boy in a conversational tone and an argot that savoured of the alley-playground. "Willie, haven't you got any other name--I mean amongst those kids that belong to your gang?" Willie swallowed hard, but inasmuch as he failed to reply, his inquisitor went on: "Surely those other kids don't call a rough-neck like you just Willie. You wouldn't stand for that, would you? Haven't you got some professional name like Bulldog Bill--or something?" A fugitive glint of pride flashed in the boy's eyes under their cultivated toughness and their present alarm, and with a sheepish grin he enlightened this embodiment of the law. "The other kids calls me 'Apache Bill.'" The Judge did not smile, but accepted the information with full gravity, and spoke reflectively: "Officer McGuire tells me that there are about a dozen members in your gang. It looks like a feller that can boss a crew of that size ought to have something in him. Look here, kid, let's talk this over." After five minutes of low-toned confidences the man on the bench found himself looking into eyes of abated sullenness and listening to a voice that was simply small boy. "You see it's a sucker play for you to travel the route that ends in the pen." The Judge made it seem that Apache Bill himself had arrived at this sane conclusion in which his Honour merely concurred. "And since you realize that yourself, I'm not going to send you to the Reform School this trip. You are going to give me your promise to run that gang differently." He looked up, and his glance fell on a young woman sitting among several others at the back of the room. There was much in her appearance to arrest the attention and challenge interest, but what one noticed most were eyes that held an inner light and a starry brightness. "I'm going to have you report to one of our probation officers every week," continued the Judge to Willie alias "Apache Bill," "and come to see me myself occasionally."