gone back on it! He had gone back on himself. He had gone back on
Dede. She was right, a thousand times right, and she had sense enough
to know it, sense enough to refuse to marry a money slave with a
whiskey-rotted carcass.

He got out of bed and looked at himself in the long mirror on the
wardrobe door. He wasn't pretty. The old-time lean cheeks were gone.
These were heavy, seeming to hang down by their own weight. He looked
for the lines of cruelty Dede had spoken of, and he found them, and he
found the harshness in the eyes as well, the eyes that were muddy now
after all the cocktails of the night before, and of the months and
years before. He looked at the clearly defined pouches that showed
under his eyes, and they've shocked him. He rolled up the sleeve of
his pajamas. No wonder the hammer-thrower had put his hand down.
Those weren't muscles. A rising tide of fat had submerged them. He
stripped off the pajama coat. Again he was shocked, this time but the
bulk of his body. It wasn't pretty. The lean stomach had become a
paunch. The ridged muscles of chest and shoulders and abdomen had
broken down into rolls of flesh.

He sat down on the bed, and through his mind drifted pictures of his
youthful excellence, of the hardships he had endured over other men, of
the Indians and dogs he had run off their legs in the heart-breaking
days and nights on the Alaskan trail, of the feats of strength that had
made him king over a husky race of frontiersmen.

And this was age. Then there drifted across the field of vision of his
mind's eye the old man he had encountered at Glen Ellen, corning up the
hillside through the fires of sunset, white-headed and white-bearded,
eighty-four, in his hand the pail of foaming milk and in his face all
the warm glow and content of the passing summer day. That had been
age. "Yes siree, eighty-four, and spryer than most," he could hear the
old man say. "And I ain't loafed none. I walked across the Plains with
an ox-team and fit Injuns in '51, and I was a family man then with
seven youngsters."

Next he remembered the old woman of the chaparral, pressing grapes in
her mountain clearing; and Ferguson, the little man who had scuttled
into the road like a rabbit, the one-time managing editor of a great
newspaper, who was content to live in the chaparral along with his
spring of mountain water and his hand-reared and manicured fruit trees.
Ferguson had solved a problem. A weaklin