rd-pictures of the grand sights and scenes which were
awaiting their arrival at Chicago, and unintentionally drifted into
describing the many cases he had heard about, where penniless boys there
had risen in a comparatively short time to the rank of
multimillionaires.

Joe, who until now paid more attention to the rough, stone ballasted
track beneath his feet that made walking a hardship, became greatly
interested in the subject that Slippery had reached in his conversation,
as it concerned the same matter that Jim and he had threshed out so many
times before they left their section home at Rugby, and when Slippery
spoke in glowing terms of the many advantages that employment in a large
city like Chicago held out to a hustling lad, Joe threw all his troubles
to the winds and laid bare to his older comrade every movement since his
childhood, and finally came to the point where he and Jim had planned to
run away to a city and there by watching for every chance of advancement
offered them, and by saving every cent and especially by adhering
strictly to honesty, had intended to work their way up the ladder of
success until they had reached a respected and independent position.
After he had paused to take a second breath, with a true boyish fervor,
he commenced to build aircastles as to what he would do when the day
arrived when they would not have to look so closely to the saving of
their pennies. The more enthusiastically Joe spoke of this bright
future, the less he became aware that his hopes had caused the answers
he received to his many questions he asked his older companion to become
more curt and sullen, nor did he realize that every word he spoke
stabbed Slippery's conscience as if it were a two-edged dagger.

Slippery, although he belonged to the the yeggs, had like ninety-nine
out of every hundred of his kind, been in his youth a harmless boy who
had been enticed by some good-for-nothing tramp to forsake his home, and
showing more ambition than to end his days as an alcohol-rotted wreck,
had drifted along with criminals, who for the sake of a few dollars or
even a handful of unused postage stamps did not hesitate to commit
murder, and who had in time taught Slippery the various divisions and
subdivisions of their dangerous existence.

Now that Slippery was barely thirty years of age, he was, although young
in years, old in crime and had been in many collisions with those who
represented law and order, and had ser