d as ever."

I wondered what Hunky Magee thought about his own story; so I asked
him if he had any theories about reincarnation and transmogrification
and such mysteries as he had touched upon.

"Nothing like that," said Hunky, positively. "What ailed High Jack
was too much booze and education. They'll do an Indian up every
time."

"But what about Miss Blue Feather?" I persisted.

"Say," said Hunky, with a grin, "that little lady that stole High Jack
certainly did give me a jar when I first took a look at her, but it
was only for a minute. You remember I told you High Jack said that
Miss Florence Blue Feather disappeared from home about a year ago?
Well, where she landed four days later was in as neat a five-room flat
on East Twenty-third Street as you ever walked sideways through--and
she's been Mrs. Magee ever since."

THE MOMENT OF VICTORY

Ben Granger is a war veteran aged twenty-nine--which should enable
you to guess the war. He is also principal merchant and postmaster of
Cadiz, a little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico
perpetually blow.

Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater
Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a
corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air
college in which the Filipino was schooled. Now, with his bayonet
beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal's guard of
cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the
matted jungles of Mindanao. Always have his interest and choice been
for deeds rather than for words; but the consideration and digestion
of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will
attest.

"What is it," he asked me one moonlit eve, as we sat among his boxes
and barrels, "that generally makes men go through dangers, and fire,
and trouble, and starvation, and battle, and such recourses? What
does a man do it for? Why does he try to outdo his fellow-humans, and
be braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his best
friends are? What's his game? What does he expect to get out of it?
He don't do it just for the fresh air and exercise. What would you
say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for
his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in
the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields,
links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and _vice versa_
places