red and ninety-two pounds more before Mr. Dorgan will discharge
her away from the side-show."

"And at the rate she is wearing herself away," said Mr. Medderbrook,
"that will be in about ten years! What interests me more is that the
telegram came collect and cost me forty cents. If you want to do the
square thing, Mr. Gubb, you'll pay me twenty cents for your share of
that telegram."

Mr. Gubb immediately gave Mr. Medderbrook twenty cents and Mr.
Medderbrook kindly allowed him to keep the telegram. Mr. Gubb placed
it in the pocket nearest his heart and proceeded to a house on Tenth
Street where he had a job of paper-hanging.

At about this same time Smith Wittaker, the Riverbank Marshal--or
Chief of Police, as he would have been called in a larger
city--knocked the ashes from his pipe against the edge of his
much-whittled desk in the dingy Marshal's room on the ground floor of
the City Hall, and grinned at Mr. Griscom, one of Riverbank's
citizens.

"Well, I don't know," he said with a grin. "I don't know but what I'd
be glad to be un-burgled like that. I guess it was just somebody
playing a joke on you."

"If it was," said Mr. Griscom, "I am ready to do a little joking
myself. I'm just enough of a joker to want to see whoever it was in
jail. My house is my house--it is my castle, as the saying is--and I
don't want strangers wandering in and out of it, whether they come to
take away my property, or leave property that is not mine. Is there,
or is there not, a law against such things as happened at my house?"

"Oh, there's a law all right," said Marshal Wittaker. "It's burglary,
whether the burglar breaks into your house or breaks out of it. How do
you know he broke out?"

"Well, my wife and I went to the Riverbank Theater last night," said
Mr. Griscom, "and when I got home and went to put the key in the
keyhole, there was another key in it. Here are the two keys."

Marshal Wittaker took the two keys and examined them. One was an old
doorkey, much worn, and the other a new key, evidently the work of an
amateur key-maker.

"All right," said Marshal Wittaker, when he had examined the keys.
"This new one was made out of an old spoon. Go ahead."

"We never had a key like that in the house," said Mr. Griscom. "But
when we reached home last night, this nickel-silver key was sticking
in the lock of the front door, on the outside, and the door was
unlocked and standing ajar."

"Just as if some one had gone in at th