arfully on the
managing editor, "he got arrested--and I couldn't get here no sooner,
'cause they kept a-stopping me, and they took me cab from under
me--but--" he pulled the notebook from his breast and held it out with
its covers damp and limp from the rain--"but we got Hade, and here's Mr.
Dwyer's copy."

And then he asked, with a queer note in his voice, partly of dread and
partly of hope, "Am I in time, sir?"

The managing editor took the book, and tossed it to the foreman, who
ripped out its leaves and dealt them out to his men as rapidly as a
gambler deals out cards.

Then the managing editor stooped and picked Gallegher up in his arms,
and, sitting down, began to unlace his wet and muddy shoes.

Gallegher made a faint effort to resist this degradation of the
managerial dignity; but his protest was a very feeble one, and his head
fell back heavily oh the managing editor's shoulder.

[Illustration: "Why, it's Gallegher," said the night editor.]

To Gallegher the incandescent lights began to whirl about in circles,
and to burn in different colors; the faces of the reporters kneeling
before him and chafing his hands and feet grew dim and unfamiliar, and
the roar and rumble of the great presses in the basement sounded far
away, like the murmur of the sea.

And then the place and the circumstances of it came back to him again
sharply and with sudden vividness.

Gallegher looked up, with a faint smile, into the managing editor's
face. "You won't turn me off for running away, will you?" he whispered.

The managing editor did not answer immediately. His head was bent, and
he was thinking, for some reason or other, of a little boy of his own,
at home in bed. Then he said quietly, "Not this time, Gallegher."

Gallegher's head sank back comfortably on the older man's shoulder, and
he smiled comprehensively at the faces of the young men crowded around
him. "You hadn't ought to," he said, with a touch of his old impudence,
'"cause--I beat the town."

BLOOD WILL TELL

David Greene was an employee of the Burdett Automatic Punch Company. The
manufacturing plant of the company was at Bridgeport, but in the New
York offices there were working samples of all the punches, from the
little nickel-plated hand punch with which conductors squeezed holes in
railroad tickets, to the big punch that could bite into an iron plate as
easily as into a piece of pie. David's duty was to explain these
different punches, and a