d-bye and good luck" with much waving of
handkerchiefs. Only his aunt sat grim-visaged and motionless, refusing
to concede so much as a glance in her nephew's direction.

Wallie, in turn, took off his girlish sailor and swung it through the
bus window and wafted kisses at the dear, amiable folk of The Colonial
until the motor had passed between the stately pillars of the entrance.
Then he leaned back with a sigh and with the feeling of having "burned
his bridges behind him."

CHAPTER VII

HIS "GAT"

"How much 'Jack' did you say you got?" Pinkey, an early caller at the
Prouty House, sitting on his heel with his back against the wall,
awaited with evident interest an answer to this pointed question. He
explained further in response to Wallie's puzzled look:
"Kale--dinero--the long green--_money_."

"Oh," Wallie replied, enlightened, "about $1,800." He was in his blue
silk pajamas, sitting on the iron rail of his bed--it had an edge like a
knife-blade.

There was no resemblance between this room and the one he had last
occupied. The robin's egg-blue alabastine had scaled, exposing large
patches of plaster, and the same thing had happened to the enamel of the
wash-bowl and pitcher--the dents in the latter leading to the conclusion
that upon some occasion it had been used as a weapon.

A former occupant who must have learned his art in the penitentiary had
knotted the lace curtains in such a fashion that no one ever had
attempted to untie them, while the prison-like effect of the iron bed,
with its dingy pillows and counterpane and sagging middle, was such as
to throw a chill over the spirits of the cheeriest traveller.

It had required all Wallie's will power, when he had arrived at
midnight, to rise above the depression superinduced by these
surroundings. His luggage was piled high in the corner, while the two
trunks setting outside his doorway already had been the cause of threats
of an alarming nature, made against the owner by sundry guests who had
bruised their shins on them in the ill-lighted corridor.

Pinkey's arrival had cheered him wonderfully. Now when that person
observed tentatively that $1,800 was "a good little stake," Wallie
blithely offered to count it.

"You got it with you?"

Wallie nodded.

"That's chancey," Pinkey commented. "They's people in the country would
stick you up if they knowed you carried it."

"I should resist if any one attempted to rob me," Wallie declared as he
s