The superintendent looked at Isaac steadily and not unkindly, while he listened to the officer’s story.

“Off with those bracelets!” he said, sternly.

Isaac Masters regarded the superintendent gratefully.  For the first time since he had been rebuffed by the station policeman, his natural expression of trust returned to his face.

“I’ll forgive him,” said the boy of a simple, Christian education.  “It was dark—­and he made a mistake.”  Isaac wiped the clotted blood from his cheeks.  “Can I go now?”

Even a less experienced man than the white-haired superintendent would have known that the young man before him could no more have committed a crime or told an untruth than an oak.  The policeman who had clubbed him, perhaps with the best intentions in the world, hung his head.

“Let me hear your story first.”  The superior officer spoke in his most fatherly tones.  He really pitied the country lad.

“What is your name?  Where do you come from?  How did you get there?  Tell me all about it.  Here, sergeant, get him a glass of water, first.”

“Perhaps a little whiskey would do him good,” suggested a night-hawk who had just opened the door of the reporters’ room.  Blood acts terribly upon even the most stolid imagination.  Beneath that red-streaked mask it needed all the experience of the superintendent to recognize the innocence of a juvenile heart.  As Isaac in indignant refusal turned his disfigured head upon the youthful representative of an aged paper, he seemed to the thoughtless reporter the incarnation of a wounded beast.  The young fellow opened the door, and beckoned his mates in to see the new show that was enacting before them.  It is only fair to say that it is due to the modern insanity of the press for prying into private affairs that the worst phase of the tragedy I am relating came to pass.

Isaac Masters told his story eagerly and simply.

“I have done nothing to be arrested for,” he ended, looking at the superintendent with his round, honest eyes.  “I only did my duty as anybody else would.  Now let me go.  Tell me, Mr. Officer, where I can get a decent night’s lodging, for I am going home to-morrow.  I’ve had enough of this city.  I want to go home!”

Something like a sob sounded in the throat of the huge boy as he came to this pathetic end.  Every man in the station, from the most hardened observer of crime to the youngest reporter of misery, was moved.  Isaac himself, still dizzy from the effects of the blow, nauseated by the prison smell, the indescribable odor of crime which no disinfectants can overcome, confounded by the surroundings into which he had been cast, and trembling with the nameless apprehension that all honest people feel when drawn into the arms of the law, swayed and swooned again.

The sergeant and the reporters (for they were not without kind hearts) busied themselves with bringing him to.  From an opposite bench the murderer lowered, between scowls of pain, upon the man who had crushed him.  There had been revealed to him a simplicity of soul residing in a body of iron.  He saw that the country lad had fainted, not from physical weakness, but because of mental anguish.  Such an apparent disparity between mind and body had not been brought to the saloon-keeper’s experience before.