ig Six automobile that dinner basket came from? Now you
tell me that and you'll make a friend. You seem to need one all right."

Billy was surprised by his own boldness in this speech. The fact was the
man's manner had quite startled him.

The prisoner laughed in a coarse guffaw. Abruptly checking himself, he
said in a whisper: "You get me out o' here. Swipe the keys--any old way!
Pass me in a saw--just so's I get out to-night, an' I'll show you where
you can find that automobile, good as ever she was. And--" the fellow
swore venomously and wickedly--"you blab this an' I'll get ye fer it if
I go to the chair!"

"Might as well be reasonable," spoke the boy, frightened by the very
nature of the proposal, but scarcely showing it. "I'll help you get out
if it means just paying a fine for you, if you can do all you say,
but----"

"Do all I _say?_ Don't you think I couldn't?"

Billy hardly knew what to say. For a few seconds he made no answer.

"Aw, I was just a kiddin' ye," the fellow said with a coarse laugh
again, as if he had quite suddenly changed his mind.

"Oh! All right!" the boy replied indifferently. And then, moved by a
sudden impulse, whose origin he could never have explained, he stepped
close to the cell, "Mr. Smith, of Buffalo, has been staying at our
hotel. Maybe you'd like to see _him_," he said in a low tone. "He was
looking for someone and I shouldn't be surprised from what I saw of him
that you are the man."

In general it was a chance shot--a random word without particular aim,
such as Fobes had used in his questioning, but Billy fully believed that
the remark struck home.

"Say, kid, say, on the level is he the party His Nibbs was talkin'
about? Look 'e here, bub, you play fair with the old man that's down an'
out. You won't lose nothin' by it. They's none of 'em plays fair any
more or I wouldn't be here. You slip them very words to Smith fer me,
and don't ye breathe it to His Nibbs."

"Where's our machine?" persisted Worth soberly.

Again a vile oath came from the dirty lips pressed between the bars. The
prisoner's pleading manner had changed to anger. "Jest like 'em all,
ain't ye?" he said with a vicious sneer in his tone. Then he walked
away. Nothing Billy could say served to draw another word from him and
that young gentleman could only take his leave. This he did with the
words: "We are over at the American hotel. You may want to send for us
when you get a little sense."

"How was I t