When the Salvation Army’s street service had been concluded, led by flying flags and keeping step to the beating of a drum they marched to their prayer hall.  Kansas Shorty, supported in his unsteady gait by two brethren of the Army, walked in the midst of the procession, while Joe kept some distance in the rear, never permitting his eyes to stray off the shambling form of the man who held the key to the riddle that had so effectively spoiled Joe’s joy of life.

After the army had entered the meeting hall, Joe called on the leader and gave him a brief outline of his past and asked him to assist him to cause Kansas Shorty to make a complete confession.  The leader called his latest convert into his private office and explained to him that it was not James but his twin brother Joe of whom he had begged forgiveness, and he spoke so earnestly to the penitent outcast that the latter made a clean breast of all he knew concerning James McDonald, and although the leader as well as Joe tried to make him reveal more, he steadfastly maintained that after Jim’s arrest at Denver he had left that city in a hurry and did not know anything further concerning his fate.

When Joe left the Salvation Army’s headquarters it was he who had to seek support to keep himself from falling, as the information he had just received unnerved him so completely that he could barely walk, for what Kansas Shorty had told not only proved that with Jim’s disappearance he had lost every member of his family, but that his brother had also disgraced their good name.

Late that night while he rolled restlessly about upon his bed, tormented by this last disappointment, and while he puzzled his feverish mind, a strong resentment came over him that Jim should have permitted himself to be so easily led astray by a good-for-nothing tramp, but when he remembered the circumstances of his own experience with Slippery, the yegg, brotherly love got the mastery over him and an idea flashed through his mind, that if Jim had been arrested at Denver the court records there should show the sentence the Judge had imposed, and that, although it seemed merely a forlorn hope, there was a chance to pick up the trail that would lead to something, and even if he failed to accomplish anything, for the sake of his own satisfaction, that he had done everything possible to clear up his brother’s disappearance, he decided to leave on the morning for Denver.

[Illustration:  The Salvation Army]

CHAPTER XV.

“Forgive and Forget.”

In the morning Joe put his plan into execution by applying for and receiving a month’s leave of absence, and taking the first train, he arrived early on the second day at Denver.  Here he hastened to the court house and had the city clerk search in musty records and when he came close to the date that Joe had calculated tallied with Kansas Shorty’s story, they found James McDonald’s name, and the sentence the judge had imposed which read:  “Imprisonment in the Colorado State Reformatory at Buena Vista until of age.”