m at the back of the right. He pulled
tight the paper-thin overcoat which he had bought at a second-hand
dealer's shop, and dared a Chicago blizzard, with needles of snow
thundering by on a sixty-mile gale. Through a street of unutterably
drab stores and saloons he plowed to the Unallied Taxicab Company's
garage. He felt lonely, cold, but he observed with ceaseless interest
the new people, different people, who sloped by him in the dun web of
the blizzard. The American marveled at a recently immigrated Slav's
astrachan cap.

He had hung about the Unallied garage on evenings when he was too poor
to go to vaudeville. He had become decidedly friendly with the night
washer, a youngster from Minneapolis. Trotting up to the washer, who
was digging caked snow from the shoes of a car, he blurted:

"Say, Coogan, I've beat my job at ----'s. How's chances for getting a
taxi to drive? You know I know the game."

"You? Driving a taxi?" stammered the washer. "Why, say, there was a
guy that was a road-tester for the Blix Company and he's got a cousin
that knows Bathhouse John, and that guy with all his pull has been
trying to get on drivin' here for the last six months and ain't landed
it, so you see about how much chance you got!"

"Gosh! it don't look much like I had much chance, for a fact."

"Tell you what I'll do, though. Why don't you get on at some
automobile factory, and then you could ring in as a chauffeur, soon 's
you got some recommends you could take to the Y. M. C. A. employment
bureau." The washer gouged at a clot of ice with his heel, swore
profusely, and went on: "Here. You go over to the Lodestar Motor
Company's office, over on La Salle, Monday, and ask for Bill Coogan,
on the sales end. He's me cousin, and you tell him to give you a card
to the foreman out at the works, and I guess maybe you'll get a job,
all right."

Tuesday morning, after a severe questioning by the foreman, Carl was
given a week's try-out without pay at the Lodestar factory. He proved
to be one of those much-sought freaks in the world of mechanics, a
natural filer. The uninspired filer, unaware of the niceties of the
art, saws up and down, whereas the instinctive filer, like Carl, draws
his file evenly across the metal, and the result fits its socket
truly. So he was given welcome, paid twenty-five cents an hour, and
made full member of exactly such a gang as he had known at Plato,
after he had laughed away the straw boss who tried to make