Carl had never stood in the bread-line, if he had never been
compelled to clean a saloon gutter artistically, in order to keep from
standing in that bread-line, he would surely have gone back to the
commonplaceness for which every one except Bone Stillman and Henry
Frazer had been assiduously training him all his life. They who know
how naturally life runs on in any sphere will understand that Carl did
not at the time feel that he was debased. He lived twenty-four hours a
day and kept busy, with no more wonder at himself than is displayed by
the professional burglar or the man who devotes all his youth to
learning Greek or soldiering. Nevertheless, the work itself was so
much less desirable than driving a car or wandering through the
moonlight with Eve L'Ewysse in days wonderful and lost that, to endure
it, to conquer it, he had to develop a control over temper and speech
and body which was to stay with him in windy mornings of daring.

Within three months Carl had become assistant bar-keeper, and now he
could save eight dollars a week. He bought a couple of motor magazines
and went to one vaudeville show and kept his sub-landlord's daughter
from running off with a cadet, wondering how soon she would do it in
any case, and receiving a depressing insight into the efficiency of
society for keeping in the mire most of the people born there.

Three months later, at the end of winter, he was ready to start for
Panama.

He was going to Panama because he had read in a Sunday newspaper of
the Canal's marvels of engineering and jungle.

He had avoided making friends. There was no one to give him farewell
when he emerged from the muck. But he had one task to perform--to
settle with the Saloon Snob.

Petey McGuff was the name of this creature. He was an oldish and
wicked man, born on the Bowery. He had been a heavy-weight
prize-fighter in the days of John L. Sullivan; then he had met John,
and been, ever since, an honest crook who made an excellent living by
conducting a boxing-school in which the real work was done by
assistants. He resembled a hound with a neat black bow tie, and he
drooled tobacco-juice down his big, raw-looking, moist, bristly,
too-masculine chin. Every evening from eleven to midnight Petey McGuff
sat at the round table in the mildewed corner at the end of the bar,
drinking old-fashioned whisky cocktails made with Bourbon, playing
Canfield, staring at the nude models pasted on the milky surface of an
ol