was all about, and determined to ask the next man who
evinced even mute wonderment at his presence what was
eating him.

Then Billy saw a harness bull strolling toward him from
the east. It was Lasky. When Lasky saw Billy he too opened
his eyes in surprise, and when he came quite close to the
mucker he whispered something to him, though he kept his
eyes straight ahead as though he had not seen, Billy at all.

In deference to the whispered request Billy presently
strolled around the corner toward Walnut Street, but at the
alley back of the saloon he turned suddenly in. A hundred
yards up the alley he found Lasky in the shadow of a telephone
pole.

"Wotinell are you doin' around here?" asked the patrolman.
"Didn't you know that Sheehan had peached?"

Two nights before old man Schneider, goaded to desperation
by the repeated raids upon his cash drawer, had shown
fight when he again had been invited to elevate his hands,
and the holdup men had shot him through the heart. Sheehan
had been arrested on suspicion.

Billy had not been with Sheehan that night. As a matter
of fact he never had trained with him, for, since the boyish
battle that the two had waged, there had always been ill
feeling between them; but with Lasky's words Billy knew
what had happened.