et car. Johnny
had an impulse to stop there for the night and leave the city to a more
propitious time, but Bland was already licking lips in anticipation of
the joys of Spring Street, and made such vehement protest that Johnny
yielded. If he stayed in Inglewood Bland would go on without him, and
Johnny did not want that, for Bland might not come back. And whatever
his mental and moral shortcomings, Bland was somebody whom Johnny knew;
if not a friend, yet a familiar personality in a city filled with
strangers.

Perhaps it was the night that veiled the city's big human workaday side
and showed only the cold, blue-white residence streets palm-shaded and
remote, and the inhospitable closed stores and shops of the business
district, that gave Johnny a lost, lonesome feeling of utter
homelessness. For the matter of that, Johnny could not remember when
he was not homeless--but he did not often feel depressed by the fact.
He followed Bland down the car steps at Fifth Street, walked with him
past a delicatessen store whence apartment dwellers were trickling,
their hands full of small paper bags and packages. They looked pale
and sickly and harassed to Johnny, to whom desert-browned faces were a
standard by which he measured all others.

A barber shop reminded him of grime and untrimmed hair, and he halted
so abruptly that Bland forged several paces ahead before he missed him.
He turned back grumbling, just as Johnny went in at the door, and
followed grudgingly. He had wanted a glass of beer first of all, but
yielded the point and took his shave resignedly.

Johnny spent a full hour in that shop, and when he emerged he was worth
the second glance he got from the girls hurrying homeward. Tubbed,
shaven, trimmed, a fresh shine on boots that still showed the marks of
spurs worn from dawn to dark when those boots were new, he towered
above Bland Halliday, who looked dingier and more down-at-heel than
ever by contrast. It would take more than shaven jowls to make a
gentleman of Bland.

They went on to Broadway, crossed it precariously, and reached the
pavement by what Johnny considered a hair's-breadth of safety as a big
car slid past his heels. They passed lighted plate-glass windows
wherein silver and gold gleamed richly. Then Bland unwittingly pushed
Johnny Jewel from the edge of obscurity into the bright light of
notoriety again.

Bland said, "I know a joint where we can git a good room for fifty
cents--and no q