VII + 

I thought I was moving silently down between two strings of box cars, but I had gone less than twenty feet when a light flashed in my face and a sharp voice ordered: + 

“Stand still, you.” + 

I stood still. Men came from between cars. One of them spoke my name, adding: “What are you doing here? Lost?” It was Harry Pebble, a police detective. + 

I stopped holding my breath and said: + 

“Hello, Harry. Looking for Babe?” + 

“Yes. We’ve been going over the rattlers.” + 

“He’s here. I just tailed him in from the street.” + 

Pebble swore and snapped the light off. + 

“Watch, Harry,” I advised. “Don’t play with him. He’s packing plenty of gun and he’s cut down one boy tonight.” + 

“I’ll play with him,” Pebble promised, and told one of the men with him to go over and warn those on the other side of the yard that McCloor was in, and then to ring for reinforcements. + 

“We’ll just sit on the edge and hold him in till they come,” he said. + 

That seemed a sensible way to play it. We spread out and waited. Once Pebble and I turned back a lanky bum who tried to slip into the yard between us, and one of the men below us picked up a shivering kid who was trying to slip out. Otherwise nothing happened until Lieutenant Duff arrived with a couple of carloads of coppers. + 

Most of our force went into a cordon around the yard. The rest of us went through the yard in small groups, working it over car by car. We picked up a few hoboes that Pebble and his men had missed earlier, but we didn’t find McCloor. + 

We didn’t find any trace of him until somebody stumbled over a railroad bull huddled in the shadow of a gondola. It took a couple of minutes to bring him to, and he couldn’t talk then. His jaw was broken. But when we asked if McCloor had slugged him, he nodded, and when we asked in which direction McCloor had been headed, he moved a feeble hand to the east. + 

We went over and searched the Santa Fe yards. + 

We didn’t find McCloor. + 