ddling fools as he went.

"They might as well kill a man as scare him to death," he said, with an
attempt to get back to his customary flippancy. But the effort was
somewhat pitiful, and he felt guiltily conscious that a salt, warm tear
was creeping slowly down his face, and that a lump that would not keep
down was rising in his throat.

"Tain't no fair thing for the whole police force to keep worrying at a
little boy like me," he said, in shame-faced apology. "I'm not doing
nothing wrong, and I'm half froze to death, and yet they keep a-nagging
at me."

It was so cold that when the boy stamped his feet against the footboard
to keep them warm, sharp pains shot up through his body, and when he
beat his arms about his shoulders, as he had seen real cabmen do, the
blood in his finger-tips tingled so acutely that he cried aloud with the
pain.

He had often been up that late before, but he had never felt so sleepy.
It was as if some one was pressing a sponge heavy with chloroform near
his face, and he could not fight off the drowsiness that lay hold of
him.

He saw, dimly hanging above his head, a round disk of light that seemed
like a great moon, and which he finally guessed to be the clock-face for
which he had been on the lookout. He had passed it before he realized
this; but the fact stirred him into wakefulness again, and when his
cab's wheels slipped around the City Hall corner, he remembered to look
up at the other big clock-face that keeps awake over the railroad
station and measures out the night.

He gave a gasp of consternation when he saw that it was half-past two,
and that there was but ten minutes left to him. This, and the many
electric lights and the sight of the familiar pile of buildings,
startled him into a semi-consciousness of where he was and how great was
the necessity for haste.

He rose in his seat and called on the horse, and urged it into a
reckless gallop over the slippery asphalt. He considered nothing else
but speed, and looking neither to the left nor right dashed off down
Broad Street into Chestnut, where his course lay straight away to the
office, now only seven blocks distant.

Gallegher never knew how it began, but he was suddenly assaulted by
shouts on either side, his horse was thrown back on its haunches, and he
found two men in cabmen's livery hanging at its head, and patting its
sides, and calling it by name. And the other cabmen who have their stand
at the corner were swarm