Old Jack gets up, peels me off the roll and hands me to her with a bow.

“Madam,” says he, just like actors I’ve heard, “here is a tainted bill.  I am a gambler.  This bill came to me to-night from a gentleman’s son.  Where he got it I do not know.  If you will do me the favor to accept it, it is yours.”

The woman took me with a trembling hand.

“Sir,” said she, “I counted thousands of this issue of bills into packages when they were virgin from the presses.  I was a clerk in the Treasury Department.  There was an official to whom I owed my position.  You say they are tainted now.  If you only knew—­but I won’t say any more.  Thank you with all my heart, sir—­thank you—­thank you.”

Where do you suppose that woman carried me almost at a run?  To a bakery.  Away from Old Jack and a sizzling good time to a bakery.  And I get changed, and she does a Sheridan-twenty-miles-away with a dozen rolls and a section of jelly cake as big as a turbine water-wheel.  Of course I lost sight of her then, for I was snowed up in the bakery, wondering whether I’d get changed at the drug store the next day in an alum deal or paid over to the cement works.

A week afterward I butted up against one of the one-dollar bills the baker had given the woman for change.

“Hallo, E35039669,” says I, “weren’t you in the change for me in a bakery last Saturday night?”

“Yep,” says the solitaire in his free and easy style.

“How did the deal turn out?” I asked.

“She blew E17051431 for mills and round steak,” says the one-spot.  “She kept me till the rent man came.  It was a bum room with a sick kid in it.  But you ought to have seen him go for the bread and tincture of formaldehyde.  Half-starved, I guess.  Then she prayed some.  Don’t get stuck up, tenner.  We one-spots hear ten prayers, where you hear one.  She said something about ’who giveth to the poor.’  Oh, let’s cut out the slum talk.  I’m certainly tired of the company that keeps me.  I wish I was big enough to move in society with you tainted bills.”

“Shut up,” says I; “there’s no such thing.  I know the rest of it.  There’s a ‘lendeth to the Lord’ somewhere in it.  Now look on my back and read what you see there.”

“This note is a legal tender at its face value for all debts public and private.”

“This talk about tainted money makes me tired,” says I.

ELSIE IN NEW YORK

No, bumptious reader, this story is not a continuation of the Elsie series.  But if your Elsie had lived over here in our big city there might have been a chapter in her books not very different from this.

Especially for the vagrant feet of youth are the roads of Manhattan beset “with pitfall and with gin.”  But the civic guardians of the young have made themselves acquainted with the snares of the wicked, and most of the dangerous paths are patrolled by their agents, who seek to turn straying ones away from the peril that menaces them.  And this will tell you how they guided my Elsie safely through all peril to the goal that she was seeking.