under suspicion, or something, and it
became necessary to overhaul the accounts to find out where the
office stood. When that was done, my chief summoned me down town for a
private interview. Upon the table lay my weekly pay-checks for three
years back, face down. My employer eyed them and me, by turns,
curiously.

"Mr. Riis," he began stiffly, "I'm not going to judge you unheard;
and, for that matter, it is none of my business. I have known you all
this time as a sober, steady man; I believe you are a deacon in your
church; and I never heard that you gambled or bet money. It seems now
that I was never more mistaken in a man in my life. Tell me, how do
you do it, anyhow? Do you blow in the whole of your salary every week
on policy, or do you run a game of your own up there? Look at those
checks."

He pointed to the lot. I stared at them in bewilderment. They were my
own checks, sure enough; and underneath my name, on the back of each
one, was the indorsement of the infamous blackleg whose name had been
a byword ever since I could remember as that of the chief devil in the
policy blackmail conspiracy that had robbed the poor and corrupted the
police force to the core.

I went home and resigned my office as deacon. I did not explain. We
were having a little difficulty at the time, about another matter,
which made it easy. I did not add this straw, though the explanation
was simple enough. My chief grasped it at once; but then, he was not a
deacon. I had simply got my check cashed every week in a cigar-store
next door that was known to be a policy-shop for the special
accommodation of Police Headquarters in those days, and the check had
gone straight into the "backer's" bank-account. That was how. But, as
I said, it was hopeless to try to explain, and I didn't. I simply
record here what I said at the beginning, that it is no use for a
newspaper man, more particularly a police reporter, to try to be a
deacon too. The chances are all against it.

FIRE IN THE BARRACKS

The rush and roar, the blaze and the wild panic of a great fire filled
Twenty-third Street. Helmeted men stormed and swore; horses tramped
and reared; crying women, hurrying hither and thither, stumbled over
squirming hose on street and sidewalk.

The throbbing of a dozen pumping-engines merged all other sounds in
its frantic appeal for haste. In the midst of it all, seven
red-shirted men knelt beside a heap of trunks, hastily thrown up as
for