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GOING STRAIGHT
'When the sun had warmed to its work, and the outskirts' streets were sprinkled with workmen trudging into the city, Briggs hailed a trolley and boosted the kid aboard it. And then, in the calm early morning, they sped toward the still sleeping suburb that Remington had picked out as his own particular dug-out.
Briggs never carried a gun in the daytime ; his daylight business was to ''spot his lay," to get the map of the marked house and grounds well in mind, and the comings and' goings of its inmates. After that, with nightfall, the work of a regular "gun."
A short walk brought them within sight of Remington's place. Briggs shoved a still damp, morning newspaper into the boy's hand and pointed out the roof of the house, peering above its girdle of fruit-trees.
"Ring th' bell," he instructed, "an' a husky guy will come to th' door. Give him the paper an' wait ; he'll slip yu' a bundle o' kale."
Things turned out exactly as Briggs had said. The boy had scarcely pressed the bell-button when Remington opened the door and took the newspaper from him. Slipping back the catch on the spring-lock, he shut the door and rapidl thumbed thru the paper. A pencil-mark — an insignificant thing on an inner margin— met his eye. He half-closed his eyes, and the little sigh came again — the sigh of a strong man who throws up his hands and lets the water close over him.
"Here ; take this," he said, thrusting a roll of bills into the boy's grimy hand, "and if you come again, see only me — do you hear?"
The little boy clutched the bills, nodded, whisked them into his pocket, and was off like the wind.
Remington carefully erased the pencilmark, and a moment afterward joined his family at the breakfast-table. For a while he ate quietly and helped fill the insatiable porridgebowls whenever a cry arose of "My sather ith empty first."
"Um — ah — " his eyes were glued to the newspaper. "I'm afraid, little girl, we'll have to put off the seashore trip; the Riggs-Peters people are look
ing for a new munitions plant site." Remington bent over his wife and kist the moist, red lips she held up to him. At close view, he saw the violet pupils expand— a sure sign of disap^ pointment.
"And, by the way, stop old Clay bringing the paper; I've got a kid that's handier."
"Oh, Papa, can I play wiv him?" piped up a treble voice from a nest of brown curls.
"I dont think he wants to play," said Remington ; "he's a little business man," and. with three hearty kisses aimed at three porridgy mouths, he was gone.
After that Briggs' kid came quite regularly in the early mornings, and Remington always met him at the door. Usually the papers were unmarked, but when Briggs wanted double he indicated it by the simple expedient of his
The man was satiate, a bottomless w e a n d
DOX YU WAX MU II TO DIP