“And now then,” I said, “if you don’t give me the truth of this matter here and now, one of us two is going to be mighty sorry for it.”

In the early moments of my violence Boogles had protested weakly; then he began to quiver perilously.  On this I soothed him, and at the precisely right moment I cajoled.  I lured him to the bench by the corral gate, and there I conferred costly cigarettes on him as man to man.  Discreetly then I sounded for the origins of a certain bad man who had a way—­even though they might crease him—­of leaving deputy marshals where he found them.  Boogles smoked one of the cigarettes before he succumbed; but first: 

“Let me git my work,” said he, and was off to the bunk house.

I observed his part in an extended parley before the door was opened to him.  He came to me on the bench a moment later, bearing a ball of scarlet yarn, a large crochet hook of bone, and something begun in the zephyr but as yet without form.

“I’m making the madam a red one for her birthday,” he confided.

He bent his statesman’s head above the task and wrought with nimble fingers the while he talked.  It was difficult, this talk of his, scattered, fragmentary; and his mind would go from it, his voice expire untimely.  He must be prompted, recalled, questioned.  His hands worked with a very certain skill, but in his narrative he dropped stitches.  Made to pick these up, the result was still a droning monotony burdened with many irrelevancies.  I am loath to transcribe his speech.  It were better reported with an eye strictly to salience.

You may see, then—­and I hope with less difficulty than I had in seeing—­Jimmie Time and Boogles on night duty at the front of the little Western Union Office off Park Row in the far city of New York.  The law of that city is tender to the human young.  Night messenger boys must be adults.  It is one of the preliminary shocks to the visitor—­to ring for the messenger boy of tradition and behold in his uniform a venerable gentleman with perhaps a flowing white beard.  I still think Jimmie Time and Boogles were beating the law—­on a technicality.  Of course Jimmie was far descended into the vale of years, and even Boogles was forty—­but adults!

It is three o’clock of a warm spring morning.  The two legal adults converse in whispers, like bad boys kept after school.  They whisper so as not to waken the manager, a blase, mature youth of twenty who sleeps expertly in the big chair back of the railing.  They whisper of the terrific hazards and the precarious rewards of their adventurous calling.  The hazards are nearly all provided by the youngsters who come on the day watch—­hardy ruffians of sixteen or so who not only “pick on” these two but, with sportive affectations, often rob them, when they change from uniform to civilian attire, of any spoil the night may have brought them.  They are powerless against these aggressions.  They can but whisper their indignation.