ttooed with his ash night-stick on the gas-pipe frame
and peered indifferently down at the battered and gibbeted crockery.

"Hello, Batty," he said as he set the exhibit oscillating with a push
of the knee. "How 's business?"

"Pretty good," answered the patient and guttural voice. But the eyes
that seemed as calm as a cow's eyes did not look at the patrolman as he
spoke.

He had nothing to fear. He knew that he had his license. He knew that
under the faded green of his overcoat was an oval-shaped
street-peddler's badge. He also knew, which the patrolman did not,
that under the lapel of his inner coat was a badge of another shape and
design, the badge which season by season the indulgent new head of the
Detective Bureau extended to him with his further privilege of a
special officer's license. For this empty honor "Batty" Blake--for as
"Batty" he was known to nearly all the cities of America--did an
occasional bit of "stooling" for the Central Office, a tip as to a
stray yeggman's return, a hint as to a "peterman's" activities in the
shopping crowds, a whisper that a till tapper had failed to respect the
Department's dead-lines.

Yet nobody took Batty Blake seriously. It was said, indeed, that once,
in the old regime, he had been a big man in the Department. But that
Department had known many changes, and where life is unduly active,
memory is apt to be unduly short.

The patrolman tapping on the gas-pipe arch with his idle night-stick
merely knew that Batty was placid and inoffensive, that he never
obstructed traffic and always carried a license-badge. He knew that in
damp weather Batty limped and confessed that his leg pained him a bit,
from an old hurt he 'd had in the East. And he had heard somewhere
that Batty was a sort of Wandering Jew, patroling the whole length of
the continent with his broken plates and his gas-pipe frame and his
glue-bottles, migrating restlessly from city to city, striking out as
far west as San Francisco, swinging round by Denver and New Orleans and
then working his way northward again up to St. Louis and Chicago and
Pittsburgh.

Remembering these things the idle young "flatty" turned and looked at
the green-coated and sunken-shouldered figure, touched into some rough
pity by the wordless pathos of an existence which seemed without aim or
reason.

"Batty, how long 're yuh going to peddle glue, anyway?" he suddenly
asked.

The glue-peddler, watching the crowds that drift