“I think you’re right, sir,” he said at last, very gratefully; then he added with great firmness—“I’ll enlist whenever I get out.” He meant to do it, and would have done it, but for his mother. What fatality prompted her to veto the whole plan?—to abjure him with tears and clinging love, which were resistless, to remain at home and not trouble himself about the future while he had her to slave for him? She shuddered at the idea of her boy—her youngest, and the last of them all, going into a battle, and recklessly tearing through showers of bullets and walls of steel, as she knew he would do. But, could she have looked into the future, as I can now look back on the past, she would have seen there something more to be dreaded. So Jim continued to loaf about and live upon his wits, and when Joe Knevitt joined him, the old practices came as a natural result. I saw Jim once or twice and tried to reason with him, but his answer was always the same— “Mother won’t let me list.” “Then I’ll have you again soon,” I gravely remarked. “I can’t help it,” was his cool reply, and I suppose he thought the event far off. With the confirmed thief it is always some one else who is to be taken, never himself. Jim had really not over-rated his cleverness. He had grown more cautious by experience, and might have eluded me but for his rock a-head—Joe Knevitt. I believe there was a woman in this rupture—one of those flashy shop girls who sell cigars and tobacco and flirt with everybody, and whom Joe wanted entirely to himself; but the ostensible reason was a difference about their respective shares in the plunder from a certain robbery down at Greenside which puzzled us not a little. There is a certain style in every thief’s work. In any kind of job where Jim’s old plumber experience helped him, he was perfectly at home, and had this affair shown any trace of that, I should have gone for him at once. But there was no trace of violence or tearing down of wood-work, or wrenching or unscrewing. It was a shop, and the door was found locked as usual when the owner entered it next morning and found the most valuable part of his stock gone, and about twenty pounds in silver as well, which he had thought too heavy to take home the night before. I searched the whole shop _carefully_, and found no trace of the thieves or clue to their identity; and candidly may now confess that I suspected the _owner_ was the thief, that for some purpose he had robbed himself. I was mistaken, of course, for the door had been opened and locked again with skeleton keys made by Knevitt.