LITMIR.BIZ

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money at odd hours of the day and night. But after Pettigrew left there was another lean interval, and Jeffard grew haggard and ran his weight down at the rate of a pound a day.

      In the midst of this came a spasm of the reformative sort, born of a passing glimpse of Stephen Elliott's daughter on one of her charitable expeditions. The incident brought him face to face with a fact which had been unconsciously lending desperation to despair. Now that the discovery could be no more than an added twist of the thumbscrew, he began to realize that he had found in the person of the sweet-faced young woman with the far-seeing eyes the Heaven-born alchemist who could, if she so willed, transmute the flinty perverseness of him into plastic wax, shaping it after her own ideals; that it was the unacknowledged beginning of love which had found wings for the short-lived flight of higher hopes and more worthy aspirations. The day of fasting and penitence had set his feet in the way leading to reinstatement in his own good opinion; but the meeting with Constance was answerable for a worthier prompting, – a perfervid determination to fight his way back to better things for righteousness' sake, knowing that no otherwise could he hope to stand with her on the Mount of Benediction.

      It was against this anointing of grace that he had sinned; and it was in remorseful memory of it that he brushed his clothes, put on an ill-fitting air of respectability, and tramped the streets in a fruitless search for employment until he was ready to drop from fatigue and hunger. Nothing came of it. The great public, and notably the employing minority of it, is no mean physiognomist; and the gambler carries his hall-mark no less than the profligate or the drunkard.

      At the close of one of these days of disheartenment, a day wherein a single cup of coffee had been made to stand sponsor for breakfast, luncheon, and dinner, Jeffard saw a familiar figure standing at the counter in one of the newspaper offices. Knowing his man, Jeffard stopped on the sidewalk and waited. If Lansdale had but the price of a single meal in his pocket, two men would share that meal that night.

      There were two entrances to the newspaper office, and Jeffard watched beaglewise lest his chance of breaking his fast should vanish while he tarried. Presently Lansdale came out, and Jeffard fell upon him before he could latch the door.

      "Salaam! Jeffard, my son," said the outcomer. "I saw you waiting for me. How goes the world-old struggle for existence?"

      "Don't remind me of it, Lansdale; do you happen to have the price of a meal about you?"

      Lansdale smiled, and gravely tucking Jeffard's arm under his own, steered diagonally across the street toward the open doors of a café.

      "Now that is what our forefathers called Providence, and what we, being so much wiser in our own generation, call luck," he declared. "I had just got a check out of the post-office for a bit of work sent months ago to an editor whose name is unhasting. When you saw me I was closing a negotiation, by the terms of which the cashier of the 'Coloradoan' becomes my banker. Behold, now, the mysteries of – shall we say Providence? At any time within the six months I would have sworn that the opportune moment for the arrival of this bit of money-paper had come; nevertheless Providence, and the slow-geared editor, get it here just in time to save two men from going to bed supperless. Why don't you say something?"

      They were at the door of the café, and Jeffard gripped his companion's arm and thrust him in. "Can't you see that I'm too damned hungry to talk?" he demanded savagely; and Lansdale wisely held his peace until the barbarian in his guest had been appeased.

      When the soup and fish had disappeared, Jeffard was ashamed of himself, and said as much.

      "You mustn't mind what I said," he began, by way of making amends. "I used to think I was a civilized being, but, God help me, Lansdale, I'm not! When I've gone without food for twenty-four hours on end, I'm nothing more or less than a hungry savage."

      Lansdale smiled intelligence. "I know the taste of it, and it's bad medicine – for the soul as well as for the body," he rejoined. "There is reason to suspect that Shakespeare never went hungry, else he wouldn't have said, 'Sweet are the uses of adversity.' They're not sweet; they're damnably bitter. A man may come forth of the winepress with bones unbroken and insight sharpened to the puncturing point; but his capacity for evil will be increased in just proportion."

      "I don't want to believe that," said Jeffard, whose despair was not yet proof against a good meal in good company.

      "You needn't, but it's true. The necessities breed a certain familiarity with evil. Moral metes and bounds have a trick of disappearing in the day of physical dearth. When hunger has driven a man over the ethical boundary a few times, the crossing becomes easy; and when hunger drops the whip, inclination is very likely to take it up."

      Jeffard laughed. "'The words of Agur the son of Jakeh,'" he quoted. "I believe you'd moralize if you were going to be hanged, Lansdale."

      "Perhaps I should. What possible contingency could offer better opportunities? And am I not going to be hanged – or choked, which amounts to the same thing?"

      Jeffard looked up quickly and saw what the myopia of hunger had hitherto obscured: that his companion's smooth-shaven face seemed gaunter than usual, and that his hands were unsteady when he lifted the knife and fork.

      "Colorado isn't helping you, then," he said.

      "No; but it isn't altogether Colorado's fault. The Boston medicine man said change of climate, plenty of outdoor indolence, nutritious food at stated intervals. I have all any one could ask of the first, and as little of either of the others as may be."

      "But you do good work, Lansdale. I've always believed you could make it win, in time. Hasn't the time come yet?"

      "No. What I can do easiest would bring bread and meat, if I could sell it; but a literary hack-writer has no business in Colorado – or anywhere else outside of the literary centres. In Boston I could always find an odd job of reviewing, or space-writing, or something that would serve to keep body and soul together; but here they won't have me even in the newspapers."

      "Overcrowded, I suppose, like everything else in this cursed country."

      "That's the alleged reason; but the fact is that I'm not a journalist. Your thoroughbred newspaper man has more or less contempt for a fellow who can't or won't write journalese."

      They had attained to the dessert, and the waiter was opening a modest bottle of claret for them. Jeffard turned his wineglass down.

      "What! Is that the way you flout a man's hospitality?" demanded Lansdale, in mock displeasure.

      "No; I don't mean to do that. But I'm drunken with feasting now, and if I put wine into me I shall pawn the coat off my back before midnight for a stake to play with."

      Lansdale smiled. "I'll see that you don't have to. Turn up your glass."

      But Jeffard was obstinate, and sat munching raisins while Lansdale sipped his wine. When the waiter brought the cigars he came out of his reverie to say, "You want to live, don't you, Lansdale?"

      The potential man of letters took time to think about it. "I suppose I do; else I shouldn't be starving to death in Denver," he admitted finally.

      "And there is nothing but the lack of a little ready money that keeps you from giving the Boston doctor's prescription a fair trial. If I had the money I believe I'd change places with you; that is, I'd give you the money in exchange for your good chance of being able to shuffle off mortality without the help of extraneous means. I think I've had enough of it."

      "Do you? That proves how little a man has learned when he thinks he has arrived. Now pull yourself together, and tell me what you really would do if you became suddenly rich."

      "How rich?"

      "Oh, make it a comfortable figure; say eight or ten thousand a month for an income."

      "I'd do what I said I should, – change places with you; only I suppose that wouldn't be possible. Failing that" – He pondered over it for a moment, balancing his fork on the edge of his plate the while. "A few weeks ago I should have mapped out a future worth talking about. I had a lucid day, in which the things that make for ambition of the better sort had their inning. If you had asked me such a question then, I should doubtless have told you that I should try to realize the ideals of other days; to walk uprightly,

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