don’t hear from you before morning and have to turn ’em loose, I’ve got a way of keepin’ track of ’em so that we can pick ’em up again, when you find your man. What hotel you going to stop at?”

He wrote down the address David gave, and ushered him out. The partners caught a nighthawk taxi and went to their hotel first, and then instituted such inquiries as they could for the missing Mr. Cochran—all without success. Alarmed over his disappearance, and fearing that ill had befallen him, they arose, after a few hours’ sleep, prepared to resume their philanthropic quest. They pictured him as having wandered off the dock and having been sandbagged. They feared he might have fallen even into more merciless hands than those of the two callous crooks who had rooked him aboard the steamer. They recalled tales of doping, of shanghaiing, of murders done on the Barbary Coast, and dead men thrown into the bay. They forgot the boredom of his gabbling tongue, his tiresome and unquenchable garrulity, and remembered only that he was a simple and unsophisticated old fellow who had shown a touching and homely liberality to a derelict whom he had accidentally met. As their apprehensions increased, so did their sense of helplessness.

“The only thing left for us to do,” said David wisely, “is to go down to the harbor police and see if they’ve learned anything about what became of him.”

“Good!” said Goliath. “And if they ain’t, don’t you reckon we ought to kind of stir ’em up by offerin’ a reward or somethin’?”

“Sure! We can’t balk at blowin’ in a little money for that poor old cuss. I reckon we’re the only friends he’s got in this whole blamed town to look after him and help him out. But— By the great horn spoon! He ought to be in an orphan asylum or hire a guardian, I reckon.”

Glum with anxiety they boarded a Market Street car and rode to the ferry. Glum with anxiety they trudged from there to the police office and, glum with anxiety they entered. The same plain-clothes man they had interviewed in the night lowered a paper he had been reading, looked at them, recognized them, and grinned.

“Well,” he inquired pleasantly, “did you find your man Cochran? No? Humph! Guess you didn’t; but I did!”

And then, as if unable to restrain himself, he indulged in a great laugh.

“This,” he declared, again looking up at their amazed faces, “is one of the best jokes that’s blown along the water front for the past 

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