Jim had a very clear idea that the city of New York, with its thousands of sharp-eyed policemen, was no place for him. His four friends, however, were better acquainted with it and they now proposed to work their way down town before daylight, to hiding places they said they knew of. They urged him to come with them but he responded: “Too many of us together, all in House of Refuge grey jackets. We’d better scatter. I’m for the country!” Then it was “Good-bye, Jim!” all around, and “O! If you haven’t done it!”--“You’re the best kind of fellow!”--“Hope we’ll see you again, some day.” “Not in the House of Refuge,” said Jim. “I won’t let them catch me. Now you’re out, keep out, but I tell you what, boys, we haven’t anything to say against any of those officers.” So they all said, and they were off, working their stealthy way along among the huge piles of lumber. How the rest got out of the lumber yard, Jim never knew, but he found a gap in its high, picket fence, squeezed through it, and found himself in an open street. It was pretty well lighted, except for the fog, and Jim saw something, at once, that made him shiver, a little. “Just what I was afraid of!” he said. “I must wait till he moves on. He might pick me up, any way, for being here at this time o’ night.” He did not know that the policeman he saw, standing under the lamp at the street corner, was already warned and was on the lookout for five boys who had escaped from Randall’s Island. He was a real danger, therefore, and Jim did well to wait patiently until the officer marched away into the mist. Jim went forward, then, and his main idea was to get as far away as possible from the water-front. “Hullo!” he exclaimed at the end of many minutes of brisk walking. “What’s this?” Before him seemed to be a vast hollow, and the street he was on ran right across it, without any buildings on either side. “New street,” he said. “It’s the new part of the city.--There!--That’s the rap of a policeman’s club on the sidewalk. My only chance is to hide!” Down he went, over the wall-like side of that new street, clinging with toes and fingers to rough projections. In a moment more he was at the bottom, crouching close and looking up while a man in a blue uniform strolled slowly along the sidewalk. “It isn’t as high as the wall around the parade-ground,” thought Jim. “That’s too smooth to climb.--I hope the other fellows’ll get away, now they’re out. It wasn’t just right for me to let ’em out, but I couldn’t help it. It’d be awful if all the boys in the House got away! I don’t belong there, though. But what can I do? Where on earth can I go?--Anyhow, I must keep hid till daylight.” It was cold, it was foggy, and his heart sank within him as he crept slowly along the base of the wall, on a kind of exploring expedition. It was dreary waiting, but the time did wear away and the fog cleared when the sun rose.