s and
furniture were given their final try-out before going into the discards.
The only thing which stopped him from going further was the roof. He had
no means of judging what the original colors in his rug had been save by
an inch or two close to the wall, and every brass handle on the drawers
of his dresser came out at the touch. The lone faucet of cold water
dripped constantly and he had to stand on a chair each time he raised
the split green shade. When he wiped his face he fell through the hole
in the towel; he could never get over a feeling of surprise at meeting
his hands in the middle, and the patched sheets on his bed looked like
city plots laid out in squares.

He loathed the shabbiness of it, and the suggestion of germs, decay,
down-at-the-heel poverty added to his depression. He never had any such
feelings about his rough bunk filled with cedar boughs and his pine
table as he had about this iron bed, with its scratched enamel and tin
knobs, which deceived nobody into thinking them brass, or the wobbly
dresser that he swore at heartily each time he turned back a fingernail
trying to claw a drawer open.

Bruce had vowed that so long as a stone remained unturned he would stay
and turn it, but--he had run out of stones. Three untried addresses were
left in his note-book and he looked at them as he ate his frugal
breakfast speculating as to which was nearest.

"If I'd eaten as much beef as I have crow since I came to this man's
town," he meditated as he dragged his unwilling feet up the street, "I'd
be a 'shipper' in prime A1 condition. I've a notion I haven't put on
much weight since it became the chief article of my diet. If thirty days
of quail will stall a man what will six weeks of crow do to him? I doubt
if I will ever entirely get my self-respect back unless," he added with
the glimmer of a smile, "I go around and lick some of them before I
leave."

"I suppose," his thoughts ran on, "that it's a part of the scheme of
life that a person must eat his share of crow before he gets in a
position to make some one else eat it, but dog-gone!" with a wry face,
"I've sure swallowed a double portion." Then he fell to wondering if--he
consulted his note-book--J. Winfield Harrah had specialized at all upon
his method of serving up this game-bird which knows no closed season?

As he sat in Harrah's outer office on a high-backed settee of teak-wood
ornate with dragons and Chinese devils, with his feet on a rug whic