held cheaply. Poorly clothed, poorly fed, they take kindly to theft,
as a means of getting the necessities of their bare, miserable little
lives.

Once upon a time, there was a dark and dreadful age when making
cripples and dwarfs was a regular trade. Children were taken (nearly
always stolen ones) and their limbs twisted, or their faces distorted,
in order to gain sympathy from the passersby, of whom they were taught
to beg. That frightful time is long past; but the trades of begging
and thieving are still taught.

And to criminals like those in whose hands the children had fallen,
life, and child life especially, was too cheap and of too little
account to matter much. They did not in the least mind the
contemplation of a crime as horrible as the one they had just decided
on. They were afraid of the bright, alert Scouts who had fallen into
their clutches, and to them there was but one way to treat the matter
-- the shackles and the poisoned food.





CHAPTER VI

TO THE RESCUE


After this there was silence. The men slept with snores and grunts an
they moved uneasily on their hard beds, and Ivan slept only at