What was the trouble here? Why had that young fellow preferred going to prison rather than home with his mother? What was behind it all I shall never know. It was a mystery—a little eddy in the tide of the city’s life, come and gone in an instant, yet reaching down to the very depths of those things that are not meant to be seen. And as I went along I wondered where was the father of that young fellow who was to spend his first night in jail, and the father of the little paralytic girl, and the father of the blind idiot, and it seemed to me that the chief actors in these three Little Dramas of the Curbstone had been somehow left out of the programme. _*Shorty Stack, Pugilist*_ Over at the "Big Dipper" mine a chuck-tender named Kelly had been in error as regards a box of dynamite sticks, and Iowa Hill had elected to give an "entertainment" for the benefit of his family. The programme, as announced upon the posters that were stuck up in the Post Office and on the door of the Odd Fellows’ Hall, was quite an affair. The Iowa Hill orchestra would perform, the livery-stable keeper would play the overture to "William Tell" upon his harmonica, and the town doctor would read a paper on "Tuberculosis in Cattle." The evening was to close with a "grand ball." Then it was discovered that a professional pugilist from the "Bay" was over in Forest Hill, and someone suggested that a match could be made between him and Shorty Stack "to enliven the entertainment." Shorty Stack was a bedrock cleaner at the "Big Dipper," and handy with his fists. It was his boast that no man of his weight (Shorty fought at a hundred and forty) no man of his weight in Placer County could stand up to him for ten rounds, and Shorty had always made good this boast. Shorty knew two punches, and no more—a short-arm jab under the ribs with his right, and a left upper-cut on the point of the chin. The pugilist’s name was McCleaverty. He was an out and out dub—one of the kind who appear in four-round exhibition bouts to keep the audience amused while the "event of the evening" is preparing—but he had had ring experience, and his name had been in the sporting paragraphs of the San Francisco papers. The dub was a welter-weight and a professional, but he accepted the challenge of Shorty Stack’s backers and covered their bet of fifty dollars that he could not "stop" Shorty in four rounds. And so it came about that extra posters were affixed to the door of the Odd Fellows’ Hall and the walls of the Post Office to the effect that Shorty Stack, the champion of Placer County, and Buck McCleaverty, the Pride of Colusa, would appear in a genteel boxing exhibition at the entertainment given for the benefit, etc., etc.