"See here, boys, this is business. I want to find Ike Slump, and it's for his own good. He's likely to get into trouble if he doesn't see his father very soon, and it will be the police, not me, next visit. His mother's sick, boys, sick abed, and heart-broken over his absence. Come, fellows, tell me where he is."
"You're pretty fresh!" spoke out one of the crowd. "What are you after? a bluff, or a give-away?"
"If you mean I am misrepresenting Ike's danger, or that I have any unfriendly feeling towards him," said Ralph, "you are entirely wrong. I'm trying to help him, for the sake of his poor mother and others--not hurt him."
Two or three heads went close together. There was a brief undertoned conference.
"We don't bite," finally announced the spokesman of the crowd. "We'll take your message to Ike. If he wants to find you, he knows how."
"All right," said Ralph, moving away--"only he may wait too long. I'll give you a quarter to put me in touch with him for two minutes."
No one responded to the offer. A little dirty-faced urchin, who looked unhappy and out of place with that motley crew, looked longingly at Ralph. No one called him back as he moved slowly away.
Ralph left the place, and had gone about two hundred yards down the track along a high fence, when he heard a thin, piping voice call out:
"Hold on, mister, back up--I want to tell you something!"