VII.
At the end of a month “Burglar Bill of the Silver District” was the nurse-girl’s standby for frightening children. Five burglaries were attributed to him, but though Dalyrimple had only committed three, he considered that majority had it and appropriated the title to himself. He had once been seen—“a large bloated creature with the meanest face you ever laid eyes on.” Mrs. Henry Coleman, awaking at two o’clock at the beam of an electric torch flashed in her eye, could not have been expected to recognize Bryan Dalyrimple at whom she had waved flags last Fourth of July, and whom she had described as “not at all the daredevil type, do you think?”
When Dalyrimple kept his imagination at white heat he managed to glorify his own attitude, his emancipation from petty scruples and remorses—
