Having made his selection, he was in the act of tearing up a web of cloth into strips to replace his lost rope, and lower the plunder by, when he was startled by a sudden, shrill whistle, at the far-off end of the green below. He knew the whistle, and what it meant—danger! but could not conceive why the shrill sound should have been thrown out at such a time. Joe was surely growing childishly timid. Jim went to the window, ready opened, and peered out. Not a soul was in sight. Reassured, he went back to his rope-making, but had made no progress worth recording, when a loud knock at the outer door of the house brought him to his feet, with his heart beating fast with dismay. Only till he heard the door opened and a rough voice say something about “thieves in the house,” did he delay. He did not even think of a rope of cloth strips. The hands of the police were already on the door of the room. He sprang at the window, remembering as he did so the exact position of the roan pipe running down outside the house into the drains below. The pipe was of cast-iron, and fastened to the wall with strong stancheons. Jim grasped it from his perch on the window-sill, and ran down it hand under hand as if it had been a rope. It was a feat he would never have attempted in cold blood. He reached the green just as the policemen thrust out their heads at the window above and sprang their rattles. Then he dived for the nearest doorway, but was there met by a man who had helped to give the alarm, and who collared him and gave him a hard struggle for liberty. Jim was younger and lighter than his captor, but he was desperate, and he came off victor, and, leaving the man almost breathless on the ground, he was off into hiding as fast as fear and his supple limbs could carry him. The struggle, however, had taken place near a bright stair-light, and the vanquished man had a full and clear view of Jim’s features, and was able to give me, an hour or two later, such a description that I had little doubt of being able to trace the scared thief. Only _one_ had really been seen at the job, and I was not surprised, on making inquiries for Joe Knevitt, to hear that he was “away in Glasgow, and had been there for a week.” The same could not be said of Jim Hutson, for I found him in his mother’s house demurely kneeling by the hearthstone, and helping his mother by chopping sticks. He denied having been out the night before, and his mother with tears supported his statement—doubtless believing it true—for he might have waited till she slept before he went out. But I had to take him, and, of course, he was identified—picked out of a dozen men without a moment’s hesitation—and locked up. His mother was at the Police Court next day (in tears, of course), and with her old appeal on her lips— “Jim was aye a gude laddie; he may be guilty, but he’s been led away.”