There was plainly no danger that anybody now in it would help them, and Jim’s possible peril from anybody else was certainly very much less when, a few minutes later, he came back into the kitchen. Mrs. Nelson had, meantime, been telling his story, as he told it, with sympathetic additions of her own. “It fits him!” shouted Millie, but her mother exclaimed: “Rodney! What did you put on him that old red necktie for?” “Guess there isn’t anything like it on Randall’s Island,” said Rodney. “All he’s got to do, now, is to keep still till they stop hunting for him.” “They’re hunting, everywhere, just now,” remarked Jim. “I wish I knew what had become of those other fellows.” “Just you come and eat your breakfast,” said Mrs. Nelson. “Don’t mind them----” “We must go home,” said Millie, “and I can’t come right back. I’ve a lot of type-setting to do----” “I can set type,” said Jim. “I was in the printing office, all the while.” “That’s it!” exclaimed Mrs. Kirby. “Come right over, after breakfast. The last place they’d look into would be Mr. Kirby’s office. You can earn something, too.” XI JIM’S HIDING PLACE Jim enjoyed his breakfast, exceedingly. It was the first he had eaten, for a long time, without any rules against talking. It seemed as if everybody in the room talked all the while. After it was over, he and Rodney went to the door and looked out. The wide, bare space, in which the Nelson garden was beginning to grow, was not much like the House of Refuge parade-ground, although it seemed to have pretty high, stone walls on three of its sides and a row of buildings on the other. These were different buildings and nearly in the middle of the row was the Kirby place, instead of the Randall’s Island printing office. It looked very much as if all this had been getting ready to take Jim in, whenever he should get away from the Island. He had a strong, oppressive feeling, however, that he had not yet entirely escaped. “They’ll think it was awful wrong for me to get away,” he thought. “It’s just as if it was as bad as stealing to have ever been sent there. How shall I get rid of it?” He had all the while, month after month, been suffering under a sense of terrible injustice, and now it stung him again, for it was following him, and so, he knew, were men who deemed it their duty to catch him and take him back. Rodney, too, was thinking of that. “Jim,” he said, “Kirby’s printing office is better than working in our garden. They might see you, from the sidewalk, and ask where you came from.” “I guess I could tell ’em, with these clothes on,” laughed Jim, for his spirits were improving and it seemed to him as if Randall’s Island were drifting away. At that very moment, in the Bronson farmhouse, away up the Hudson, they were talking about Jim. A man had come in, just at breakfast time, and had said something which made everybody jump.