ed by him, did not
answer. He did not even look about at his interrogator.

"D' yuh _have_ to do this?" asked the wide-shouldered youth in uniform.

"No," was the peddler's mild yet guttural response.

The other prodded with his night-stick against the capacious overcoat
pockets. Then he laughed.

"I'll bet yuh 've got about forty dollars stowed away in there," he
mocked. "Yuh have now, have n't yuh?"

"I don' know!" listlessly answered the sunken-shouldered figure.

"Then what 're yuh sellin' this stuff for, if it ain't for money?"
persisted the vaguely piqued youth.

"I don' know!" was the apathetic answer.

"Then who does?" inquired the indolent young officer, as he stood
humming and rocking on his heels and swinging his stick by its
wrist-thong.

The man known as Batty may or may not have been about to answer him.
His lips moved, but no sound came from them. His attention,
apparently, was suddenly directed elsewhere. For approaching him from
the east his eyes had made out the familiar figure of old McCooey, the
oldest plain-clothes man who still came out from Headquarters to "pound
the pavement."

And at almost the same time, approaching him from the west, he had
caught sight of another figure.

It was that of a dapper and thin-faced man who might have been anywhere
from forty to sixty years of age. He walked, however, with a quick and
nervous step. Yet the most remarkable thing about him seemed to be his
eyes. They were wide-set and protuberant, like a bird's, as though
years of being hunted had equipped him with the animal-like faculty of
determining without actually looking back just who might be following
him.

Those alert and wide-set eyes, in fact, must have sighted McCooey at
the same time that he fell under the vision of the old cement seller.
For the dapper figure wheeled quietly and quickly about and stooped
down at the very side of the humming patrolman. He stooped and
examined one of the peddler's many-fractured china plates. He squinted
down at it as though it were a thing of intense interest to him.

As he stooped there the humming patrolman was the witness of a
remarkable and inexplicable occurrence. From the throat of the
huge-shouldered peddler, not two paces away from him, he heard come a
hoarse and brutish cry, a cry strangely like the bawl and groan of a
branded range-cow. At the same moment the gigantic green-draped figure
exploded into sudden activity. He seemed to