heel in the
machinery of time had made; apportioning to the sleepers while they
lay at the mercy of fate, the vengeance, profit, grief, reward and
doom that the new figure in the calendar had brought them. Shrill and
yet plaintive were the cries, as if the young voices grieved that so
much evil and so little good was in their irresponsible hands. Thus
echoed in the streets of the helpless city the transmission of the
latest decrees of the gods, the cries of the newsboys--the Clarion
Call of the Press.

Woods flipped a dime to the waiter, and said: "Get me a _Morning
Mars_."

When the paper came he glanced at its first page, and then tore a
leaf out of his memorandum book and began to write on it with the
little gold pencil.

"What's the news?" yawned Kernan.

Woods flipped over to him the piece of writing:

"The New York _Morning Mars_:

"Please pay to the order of John Kernan the one thousand
dollars reward coming to me for his arrest and conviction.

"BARNARD WOODS."

"I kind of thought they would do that," said Woods, "when you were
jollying them so hard. Now, Johnny, you'll come to the police station
with me."

XXII

EXTRADITED FROM BOHEMIA

From near the village of Harmony, at the foot of the Green Mountains,
came Miss Medora Martin to New York with her color-box and easel.

Miss Medora resembled the rose which the autumnal frosts had spared
the longest of all her sister blossoms. In Harmony, when she started
alone to the wicked city to study art, they said she was a mad,
reckless, headstrong girl. In New York, when she first took her seat
at a West Side boardinghouse table, the boarders asked: "Who is the
nice-looking old maid?"

Medora took heart, a cheap hall bedroom and two art lessons a week
from Professor Angelini, a retired barber who had studied his
profession in a Harlem dancing academy. There was no one to set her
right, for here in the big city they do it unto all of us. How many
of us are badly shaved daily and taught the two-step imperfectly by
ex-pupils of Bastien Le Page and Gerome? The most pathetic sight in
New York--except the manners of the rush-hour crowds--is the dreary
march of the hopeless army of Mediocrity. Here Art is no benignant
goddess, but a Circe who turns her wooers into mewing Toms and
Tabbies who linger about the doorsteps of her abode, unmindful of
the flying brickbats and boot-jacks of the critics. Some of us creep
back to our native vi