"Surely those other kids don't call a rough-neck like you just Willie. You wouldn't stand for that, would you? Haven't you got some professional name like Bulldog Bill—or something?"
A fugitive glint of pride flashed in the boy's eyes under their cultivated toughness and their present alarm, and with a sheepish grin he enlightened this embodiment of the law.
"The other kids calls me 'Apache Bill.'"
The Judge did not smile, but accepted the information with full gravity, and spoke reflectively:
"Officer McGuire tells me that there are about a dozen members in your gang. It looks like a feller that can boss a crew of that size ought to have something in him. Look here, kid, let's talk this over."
After five minutes of low-toned confidences the man on the bench found himself looking into eyes of abated sullenness and listening to a voice that was simply small boy.
"You see it's a sucker play for you to travel the route that ends in the pen."
The Judge made it seem that Apache Bill himself had arrived at this sane conclusion in which his Honour merely concurred.
"And since you realize that yourself, I'm not going to send you to the Reform School this trip. You are going to give me your promise to run that gang differently." He looked up, and his glance fell on a young woman sitting among several others at the back of the room. There was much in her appearance to arrest the attention and challenge interest, but what one noticed most were eyes that held an inner light and a starry brightness. "I'm going to have you report to one of our probation officers every week," continued the Judge to Willie alias "Apache Bill," "and come to see me myself occasionally."
Usually for a case of this sort he would have selected a man from that group of volunteers who made effective the machinery of the children's court but this young terrorist would take a bit of understanding in his reclamation, and among the men and women who aided and abetted his efforts no other seemed to see into the intricacies of the boy mind quite so unerringly as that young woman with the starry eyes, who had been a famous belle and before that a tom-boy.