ht he'd turn up, and I don't know whether I
am sorry or not. But now that he's here, what are you going to do
about it?

"It's my fault, but whatever you do I want to ask you not to do one
thing. I want you to promise not to try to make a fool of the boy,
Flash? You're, well--a little bit merciless on some of 'em, you know.
It's not his fault, and I--why, damn it, I haven't met a man in years
I like as I do that big, quiet, lonesome kid! Now, there's your story.
It explains the whole thing, and my apologies go with it. What are you
going to do?"

CHAPTER XV

Jesse Hogarty had been listening without moving a muscle--without once
taking his two brilliant eyes from Morehouse's warm face--even when
Morehouse refused to look back at him as he talked.

"'Introducing The Pilgrim,'" he murmured to himself, after a moment of
silence, and the professor of English accent could not have been more
perfect, "The Pilgrim! Hum-m-m, surely! And a really excellent name
for publicity purposes, too. It--it fits the man."

Then he threw back his head--he came suddenly to his feet, to pace
twice the length of the room and back, before he remembered. When he
reseated himself he was gnawing his lip as if vexed that he had showed
even that much lack of self-control. And once more he buried the point
of his chin in his hands.

"Do, Chub?" he picked up the other's question silkily. "What am I
going to do? Well, I believe I am going to pay my debts at last. I
think I am going to settle a little score that has stood so long
against me that it had nearly cost me my self-respect."

That lightning-like change swept his face again, twisting his lips
nastily, stamping all his features with something totally bad. The man
who had never been whipped by any man, from the day he won his first
brawl in the gutter, showed through the veneer that was no thicker
than the funereal black and white garb he wore, no deeper than his
superficially polished utterance which he had acquired from long
contact with those who had been born to it.

"I'm going to pay my debts," he slurred the words dangerously, "pay
them with the same coin that Dennison slipped to me two years ago!"

Little by little Morehouse's head came forward at the mention of that
name. It was of Dennison that the plump newspaper man had been
subconsciously thinking ever since he had entered Hogarty's immaculate
little office; it was of Dennison that he always thought whenever he
saw