“That you did, indeed,” replied the grateful boy.  “I would have gone to jail but for you.”

“Ye same to be a wide-awake boy, and ye kape yer sinses about ye at all times.  Ye are looking for a place to stay?”

“Yes.”

“There isn’t much of the night left, but I’ll find ye what ye want.”

A couple of blocks farther, Patsey conducted him into just the house the boy would have picked out for himself, had he been given a week in which to hunt.

Patsey accompanied Tom to his room, where he gave him some earnest advice.

“This is a moighty avil village, is New York, and ye had better get out of the same while ye have the money to do it.  It isn’t a good thing for a lad to carry a pistol, but I wish ye to kaap the one I lint ye as long as ye are in danger, which is loikely to be all yer life.”

“My money is nearly all gone,” replied Tom, “and unless I get at something pretty soon, I shall have to beg.  I would go out of the city to-morrow if I only had Jim.”

“Perhaps it is as well that ye wait where ye are for a few days for him, spinding yer laisure in looking for a job.  I’m a coochman in the employ of an old rapscallion of a lawyer, who’s stingy enough to pick the sugar out of the teeth of the flies he cotches in his sugar-bowl.  I darsn’t bring ye there, but if the worst comes and ye haven’t anything to ate, I’ll fix it some way.”

The plan was that Tom should stay in this house, visiting the other morning and evening in quest of information of Jim, while the sunlight would be spent in hunting for work.

It would be useless to dwell on the particulars of the several days which followed.  Morning and night Tom went over to the other saloon and inquired after his missing friend.  Each time the bartender replied he had not seen him, and it was his belief that the boy had “skipped the town,” as he expressed it.  The little bundle containing all of Jim’s possessions was given to Tom, who took it away with him, leaving word where his friend could find him.

Dull, leaden despair filled his heart; and, as he paid his board-bill each evening, he saw with feelings which can scarcely be pictured, the steady decrease of his pile, until it was close to the vanishing point.

Five days had passed since he entered the new hotel, during which not a word was heard of Jim, nor had he seen anything of his friend Patsey McConough.

It seemed to the boy that he had tramped New York from one end to the other in his search for work, and in not a single instance had he received the slightest encouragement.  Two vocations, it may be said, were open to him from the beginning; they were to sell newspapers or to black shoes.  To one of Tom’s education and former life, it was the most bitter humiliation to contemplate adopting either of these employments.  But the night came when he felt he must do it or beg.

He naturally preferred the newspaper line to that of polishing shoes, and he resolve to make his venture early the following morning.