"I don't care about a bed," George said. "Just some place to sleep in. Just some straw in any quiet corner."
This seemed more reasonable to the boy, and he thought the matter over.
"Well," he said at last, "I knows of a place where they puts up the hosses of the market carts. I knows a hostler there. Sometimes when it's wery cold he lets me sleep up in the loft. Aint it warm and comfortable just! I helps him with the hosses sometimes, and that's why. I will ax him if yer likes."
George assented at once. His ideas as to the possibility of sleeping in the open air had vanished when he saw the surroundings, and a bed in a quiet loft seemed to him vastly better than sleeping in a room with twenty others.
"How do you live?" he asked the lad, "and what's your name?"
"They calls me the Shadder," the boy said rather proudly; "but my real name's Bill."
"Why do they call you the Shadow?" George asked.
"'Cause the bobbies finds it so hard to lay hands on me," Bill replied.
"But what do they want to lay hands on you for?" George asked.
"Why, for bagging things, in course," Bill replied calmly.