The news of Mike's arrest had been received by kitty's neighbors with varying degrees of indifference.

Everybody realized that, as the run-over boy had lost nothing but his breath--and but little of that, judging from his vigorous howl when Mike picked him up--nothing would come of the affair so long as the present captain ruled the precinct.
Kitty and John and all who belonged to them were too popular around the station; too many of the boys had slipped in and slipped out of a cold night, warmed up by the contents of her coffee-pot.
Indeed, between the captain and the denizens of "The Avenue," only the most friendly, amicable, and delightful personal relations prevailed.

To the habitual criminal, the sneak-thief, and the hold-up, he might be a mailed despot swinging a mailed fist, but to the occasional "Monday drunk," or the man who had had the best or the worst of it in a fight, or to one like Mike who was the victim of an unavoidable accident, he was only a heathen idol of justice behind which sat a big-waisted, tightly belted man whose wife and daughters everybody knew as he himself knew everybody in return; who belonged to the same lodge, played poker in the same up-stairs room when off duty, and was as tender-hearted in time of trouble as any one of their other acquaintances.

Not to have allowed Mike, a man he knew, a man who had been Kitty and John's driver for years, to hunt up his own bond, would have been as unwise and impossible as his releasing a burglar on straw bail, or a murderer because the dead man could not make a complaint.
When, therefore, Mike burst into the kitchen with the additional information that "the cap" had let him go to bring back the wagon and somebody with "cash" enough to go bail, a general movement, headed by Tim Kelsey, who happened to be passing at the time, was immediately organized--Tim to proceed at once to the station-house, take the captain on one side, and so end the matter.

Locking up Mike, even threatening him, was, as the captain knew, an invasion of the rights of "The Avenue." Nobody within its confines had ever been entangled in the meshes of the law--simply because nobody had wanted to break it.