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“This man,” growled the sergeant, pointing with the end of his cigar to Rags, “is either drunk, or crazy, or a bit of both.”

The char-woman came down stairs majestically, in a long, loose wrapper, fanning herself with a palm-leaf fan, but when she saw the child, her majesty dropped from her like a cloak, and she ran toward her and caught the baby up in her arms. “You poor little thing,” she murmured, “and, oh, how beautiful!” Then she whirled about on the men of the reserve squad: “You, Conners,” she said, “run up to my room and get the milk out of my ice-chest; and Moore, put on your coat and go around and tell the surgeon I want to see him. And one of you crack some ice up fine in a towel. Take it out of the cooler. Quick, now.”

Raegen came up to her fearfully. “Is she very sick?” he begged; “she ain’t going to die, is she?”

“Of course not,” said the woman, promptly, “but she’s down with the heat, and she hasn’t been properly cared for; the child looks half- starved. Are you her father?” she asked, sharply. But Rags did not speak, for at the moment she had answered his question and had said the baby would not die, he had reached out swiftly, and taken the child out of her arms and held it hard against his breast, as though he had lost her and some one had been just giving her back to him.

His head was bending over hers, and so he did not see Wade and Heffner, the two ward detectives, as they came in from the street, looking hot, and tired, and anxious. They gave a careless glance at the group, and then stopped with a start, and one of them gave a long, low whistle.

“Well,” exclaimed Wade, with a gasp of surprise and relief. “So Raegen, you’re here, after all, are you? Well, you did give us a chase, you did. Who took you?”

The men of the reserve squad, when they heard the name of the man for whom the whole force had been looking for the past two days, shifted their positions slightly, and looked curiously at Rags, and the woman stopped pouring out the milk from the bottle in her hand, and stared at him in frank astonishment. Raegen threw back his head and shoulders, and ran his eyes coldly over the faces of the semicircle of men around him.

“Who took me?” he began defiantly, with a swagger of braggadocio, and then, as though it were hardly worth while, and as though the presence of the baby lifted him above everything else, he stopped, and raised her until her cheek touched his own. It rested there a moment, while Rag stood silent.

“Who took me?” he repeated, quietly, and without lifting his eyes from the baby’s face. “Nobody took me,” he said. “I gave myself up.”

One morning, three months later, when Raegen had stopped his ice-cart in front of my door, I asked him whether at any time he had ever regretted what he had done.

“Well, sir,” he said, with easy superiority, “seeing that I’ve shook the gang, and that the Society’s decided her folks ain’t fit to take care of her, we can’t help thinking we are better off, see?

[Illustration with caption: She’d reach out her hands and kiss me.]

“But, as for my ever regretting it, why, even when things was at the worst, when the case was going dead against me, and before that cop, you remember, swore to McGonegal’s drawing the pistol, and when I used to sit in the Tombs expecting I’d have to hang for it, well, even then, they used to bring her to see me every day, and when they’d lift her up, and she’d reach out her hands and kiss me through the bars, why–they could have took me out and hung me, and been damned to ’em, for all I’d have cared.”