“Ye must have been in the black hole of incarceration indeed, if ye haven’t heard that Mr. Louden has his law-office on the Square, and his livin’-room behind the office.  It’s in that little brick buildin’ straight acrost from the sheriff’s door o’ the jail—­ye’ve been neighbors this long time!  A hard time the boy had, persuadin’ any one to rent to him, but by payin’ double the price he got a place at last.  He’s a practisin’ lawyer now, praise the Lord!  And all the boys and girls of our acquaintance go to him with their troubles.  Ye’ll see him with a murder case to try before long, as sure as ye’re not worth yer salt!  But I expect ye can still call him by his name of Joe, all the same!”

It was a bleak and meagre little office into which Mr. Fear ushered himself to offer his amends.  The cracked plaster of the walls was bare (save for dust); there were no shelves; the fat brown volumes, most of them fairly new, were piled in regular columns upon a cheap pine table; there was but one window, small-paned and shadeless; an inner door of this sad chamber stood half ajar, permitting the visitor unreserved acquaintance with the domestic economy of the tenant; for it disclosed a second room, smaller than the office, and dependent upon the window of the latter for air and light.  Behind a canvas camp-cot, dimly visible in the obscurity of the inner apartment, stood a small gas-stove, surmounted by a stew-pan, from which projected the handle of a big tin spoon, so that it needed no ghost from the dead to whisper that Joseph Louden, attorney-at-law, did his own cooking.  Indeed, he looked it!

Upon the threshold of the second room reposed a small, worn, light-brown scrub-brush of a dog, so cosmopolitan in ancestry that his species was almost as undeterminable as the cast-iron dogs of the Pike Mansion.  He greeted Mr. Fear hospitably, having been so lately an offcast of the streets himself that his adoption had taught him to lose only his old tremors, not his hopefulness.  At the same time Joe rose quickly from the deal table, where he had been working with one hand in his hair, the other splattering ink from a bad pen.

“Good for you, Happy!” he cried, cheerfully.  “I hoped you’d come to see me to-day.  I’ve been thinking about a job for you.”

“What kind of a job?” asked the visitor, as they shook hands.  “I need one bad enough, but you know there ain’t nobody in Canaan would gimme one, Joe.”

Joe pushed him into one of the two chairs which completed the furniture of his office.  “Yes, there is.  I’ve got an idea—­”

“First,” broke in Mr. Fear, fingering his shapeless hat and fixing his eyes upon it with embarrassment,—­” first lemme say what I come here to say.  I—­well—­” His embarrassment increased and he paused, rubbing the hat between his hands.

“About this job,” Joe began.  “We can fix it so—­”