When the train arrived at the Chicago terminal, Joe boarded a street car that brought him quickly to the flat where he intended to acquaint its inmates with the misfortune that had overtaken Slippery and Boston Frank, and also to deliver the verbal message the latter had given him.  To his surprise he found the front of the house in which the flat was located kept clear of public traffic by a cordon of policemen, while several police patrols were backed against the curb, and were not only loaded with the handcuffed criminals, who had been caught like rats in a trap, upon the telegraphic advice of the Dixon police authorities, but with thousands of dollars worth of stolen property that had been found in trunks and other hiding places.

While Joe stood in the crowd watching the finish of those who had transgressed the law, with far better reasons than the curious idlers about him could suspect, he felt someone sharply pull his coat sleeve.  He felt himself turning ashen-gray from fright as he thought some detective had recognized him, and when the same sharp pull was repeated, trembling with fear, he turned to see who it was that knew him in Chicago, and recognized that his dread was groundless as it was “Babe” who had pulled his sleeve, the youngest girl in the den of the thieves, who luckily happened to be away from home when the police commenced the raid of the flat.

[Illustration:  Her emotions got the better of her and she placed her arms around the sobbing lad’s neck and kissed him.]

“Come, Joe,” she whispered, “I want to speak to you.”  He followed the girl and both walked to the nearby shore of Lake Michigan, where he repeated to her word for word everything that had occurred since he last saw her at the flat, and when he remarked that both of them should thank a kind Providence that had kept them out of the hands of the police, tears trickled down their cheeks, while they gazed out over the restless waters of the lake.

It was “Babe” who broke the silence by remarking:  “We are indeed lucky, Joe.  Just think of what would have been our fate had we been arrested with the others.  You would have been sent to a penal institution to emerge years later an ex-convict, a marked man forever afterwards, while I would have been sent to a home where I would have been forced to associate with the most degraded wretches.  I was only seventeen last month and was sent from a faraway western city to a boarding school in the east, where the “blue stocking” matrons made the unfettered life that I had learned to love at home such a misery for me, that I ran away and came to Chicago to seek employment.  I fell in with evil company, but, thank God, I have yet enough common sense left to know when to quit, and that is right now.  For obvious reasons, I am not going to tell you my address, but,” here she turned and out of a hiding place in her dress pulled a fair-sized roll of greenbacks, and then she continued, “I