“I haven’t had a bite all day. That’s the trouble with leaving in a hurry.”
“Well, you may keep that plug, with my regards. Now, I want to get back and interview those fellows. There’s no time to be lost.”
When they reached the group, Macdonald said:
“Here’s a man says he knows you, Mr. Yates. He claims he is a reporter, and that you will vouch for him.”
Yates strode forward, and looked anxiously at the prisoners, hoping, yet fearing, to find one of his own men there. He was a selfish man, and wanted the glory of the day to be all his own. He soon recognized one of the prisoners as Jimmy Hawkins of the staff of a rival daily, the New York Blade. This was even worse than he had anticipated.
“Hello, Jimmy!” he said, “how did you get here?”
“I was raked in by that adjective fool with the unwashed face.”
“Whose a—fool?” cried Macdonald in wrath, and grasping his hammer. He boggled slightly as he came to the “adjective,” but got over it safely. It was evidently a close call, but Sandy sprang to the rescue, and cursed Hawkins until even the prisoners turned pale at the torrent of profanity. Macdonald looked with sad approbation at his pupil, not knowing that he was under the stimulus of newly acquired tobacco, wondering how he had attained such proficiency in malediction; for, like all true artists, he was quite unconscious of his own merit in that direction.
“Tell this hammer wielder that I’m no anvil. Tell him that I’m a newspaper man, and didn’t come here to fight. He says that if you guarantee that I’m no Fenian he’ll let me go.”
Yates sat down on a fallen log, with a frown on his brow. He liked to do a favor to a fellow-creature when the act did not inconvenience himself, but he never forgot the fact that business was business.