e a word. It was power--power against skill.

There was a crash and a cry and a fall. But not until Isaac knew that
the man under him was helpless did he utter a sound. Then he called:
"Police! Police!"

The answer was a blinding blow upon the crown of his head. Then,
before his head swam away into unconsciousness, he felt a strange
thing happen to his wrists.

* * * * *

The first lieutenant, the captain, and the superintendent are
different beings from the officer of the street, who has no gilt
stripes upon his sleeves. The one, having passed through all grades,
is supposed to have been chosen not only because of his fidelity
and bravery, but because of his discriminating gentleness or
gentlemanliness. The other, a private of the force, often a foreigner,
with foreign instincts, and eager for promotion (that is, he means
to make as many arrests as possible), confuses the difference between
rudeness and authority, brutality and law. By the time he is a
sergeant sense has been schooled into him, and he ought to know
better.

The superintendent looked at Isaac steadily and not unkindly, while he
listened to the officer's story.

"Off with those bracelets!" he said, sternly.

Isaac Masters regarded the superintendent gratefully. For the first
time since he had been rebuffed by the station policeman, his natural
expression of trust returned to his face.

"I'll forgive him," said the boy of a simple, Christian education. "It
was dark--and he made a mistake." Isaac wiped the clotted blood from
his cheeks. "Can I go now?"

Even a less experienced man than the white-haired superintendent would
have known that the young man before him could no more have committed
a crime or told an untruth than an oak. The policeman who had clubbed
him, perhaps with the best intentions in the world, hung his head.

"Let me hear your story first." The superior officer spoke in his most
fatherly tones. He really pitied the country lad.

"What is your name? Where do you come from? How did you get there?
Tell me all about it. Here, sergeant, get him a glass of water,
first."

"Perhaps a little whiskey would do him good," suggested a night-hawk
who had just opened the door of the reporters' room. Blood acts
terribly upon even the most stolid imagination. Beneath that
red-streaked mask it needed all the experience of the superintendent
to recognize the innocence of a juvenile heart. As Isaac in indignant