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“That I will, Denny,” repeated the policeman, heartily, slipping him a dime for luck. “You come around to-morrow, and I will run you in. Now go along.”

But Denny didn’t go, though he had the price of two “balls” at the distillery. He shifted thoughtfully on his feet, and said:–

“Say, Schultz, if I should die now,–I am all full o’ rheumatiz, and sore,–if I should die before, would you see to me and tell the wife?”

“Small fear of yer dying, Denny, with the price of two drinks,” said the policeman, poking him facetiously in the ribs with his club. “Don’t you worry. All the same, if you will tell me where the old woman lives, I will let her know. What’s the number?”

But the Robber’s mood had changed under the touch of the silver dime that burned his palm. “Never mind, Schultz,” he said; “I guess I won’t kick; so long!” and moved off.

The snow drifted wickedly down Suffolk Street Christmas morning, pinching noses and ears and cheeks already pinched by hunger and want. It set around the corner into the Pig Market, where the hucksters plodded knee-deep in the drifts, burying the horse-radish man and his machine and coating the bare, plucked breasts of the geese that swung from countless hooks at the corner stand with softer and whiter down than ever grew there. It drove the suspender-man into the hallway of a Suffolk Street tenement, where he tried to pluck the icicles from his frozen ears and beard with numb and powerless fingers.

As he stepped out of the way of some one entering with a blast that set like a cold shiver up through the house, he stumbled over something, and put down his hand to feel what it was. It touched a cold face, and the house rang with a shriek that silenced the clink of glasses in the distillery, against the side door of which the something lay. They crowded out, glasses in hand, to see what it was.

“Only a dead tramp,” said some one, and the crowd went back to the warm saloon, where the barrels lay in rows on the racks. The clink of glasses and shouts of laughter came through the peep-hole in the door into the dark hallway as Policeman Schultz bent over the stiff, cold shape. Some one had called him.

“Denny,” he said, tugging at his sleeve.

“Denny, come. Your time is up. I am here.” Denny never stirred. The policeman looked up, white in the face.

“My God!” he said, “he’s dead. But he kept his date.”

And so he had. Denny the Robber was dead. Rum and exposure and the “rheumatiz” had killed him. Policeman Schultz kept his word, too, and had him taken to the station on a stretcher.

“He was a bad penny,” said the saloon-keeper, and no one in Jewtown was found to contradict him.