Danny repeated this disgraceful trick of basest ingratitude at several other houses.  Then he coaxed Jim into making the lying appeal necessary to sell the needle cases, and whenever Jim managed to make a sale Danny’s praises knew no bounds.  Finally Danny had just one needle case left out of the stock Jocko had handed to him to peddle, and while they waited before the open entrance door of a palatial residence for the return of the lady of the house, who had left them to find her pocketbook, and whose footfalls they could hear as she descended the stairway leading into the basement of her home, Danny deliberately pushed the unsuspecting Jim through the half-open door into the hall of the mansion, and told him in a whisper that if he did not steal something he “would tell Kansas Shorty.”

In all his past life Jim had never stolen a single cent’s worth of other people’s property, but with Danny threatening to tell Kansas Shorty should he refuse to do as told, and remembering the cruel pounding he had received at the hands of this fiend only such a short time before, and the warning ere he and Danny set out upon their begging trip to do exactly as Danny ordered, he realized that perhaps another far more brutal beating would be his should he disobey Danny’s command.

Before him was an open door, and when he entered the room he found it to be the parlor.  Looking about he saw a glittering gold watch lying upon the piano, and picked it up, and gazed at it for a moment.  “No, I must not disgrace my honest name by becoming a common thief for the mere sake of furnishing sodden wretches with rum,” he mused, but while he hesitated he heard the footfalls of the lady of the house as she ascended the stairs, then the fear of the terrible punishment that would be his if he disobeyed conquered his honesty and he slipped the time piece into his pocket and joined Danny at the entrance.

When the lady of the house came to the door she handed Danny a bright silver dollar and when he wanted to give her the needle case she refused to take it from him, and while tears of pity streamed down her face she said:  “May God forbid that I take from you poor unfortunate boys an article that you could dispose of to others, and thus further assist your starving parents”, and before the lads could utter a sound she had shut the door in their faces.

It was now half past eleven in the morning, and as road kids do “housework” only between nine and this time of the day, as after these hours the police commence to be more active and the ladies become far less inclined to listen to a tale of distress, they went back to the plinger’s headquarters.

In strict accordance with the unwritten code of the road although Jocko, his ugly-visaged jocker, was amongst those in the room, Danny paid not the least attention to his presence, but stepped up to the table upon which an empty tin plate had been placed for just this purpose, and deposited upon it every cent he had in his pockets and whatever he had pilfered from the houses.