e was a young man of theories. For
example, he had a theory that around every corner of every great city
romance lurked, ready for some one to come and find it. True, he never
had found it, but that, he insisted, was because he hadn't looked for
it; it was there all right, waiting to be flushed, like a quail from a
covert.

Voicing this belief over a drink at a club, on an evening in June, he
had been challenged promptly by one of those argumentative persons who
invariably disagree with every proposition as a matter of principle, and
for the sake of the debate.

"All rot, Green," the other man had said. "Just plain rot. Adventure's
not a thing that you find yourself. It's something that comes and finds
you--once in a life-time. I'll bet that in three months of trying you
couldn't, to save your life, have a real adventure in this town--I mean
an adventure out of the ordinary. Elopements and automobile smash-ups
are barred."

"How much will you bet?" asked Judson Green.

"A hundred," said the other man, whose name was Wainwright.

Reaching with one hand for his fountain pen, Judson Green beckoned a
waiter with the other and told him to bring a couple of blank checks.

II

So that was how it had started, and that was why Judson Green had spent
the summer in New York instead of running away to the north woods or the
New England shore, as nearly everybody he knew did. Diligently had he
sought to win that hundred dollars of the contentious Wainwright;
diligently had he ranged from one end of New York to the other, seeking
queer people and queer things--seeking anything that might properly be
said to constitute adventure. Sometimes a mildly interested and mildly
satirical friend accompanied him; oftener he went alone, an earnest and
determined young man. Yet, whether with company or without it, his luck
uniformly was poor. The founts of casual adventure had, it seemed, run
stone dry; such weather was enough to dry up anything.

Yet he had faithfully tried all those formulas which in the past were
supposed to have served the turns of those seeking adventure in a great
city. There was the trick of bestowing a thousand-dollar bill upon a
chance vagrant and then trailing after the recipient to note what
happened to him, in his efforts to change the bill. Heretofore, in
fiction at least, the following of this plan had invariably brought
forth most beautiful results. Accordingly, Judson Green tried it.

He tried it at C