But I don't catch the conversation. What was all that con
you were giving me--?"

"Con?"

"About Johnson and the triangles."

"It simply occurred to me to tell you a funny story, of the sort that
men are known to like, with the hope of amusing you--"

"Why, that wasn't a funny story, Doc."

"I assure you that it was."

"Don't see it," said Klinker.

"That is not my responsibility, in any sense."

Thus Doctor Queed, sitting stiffly on his hard little chair, and gazing
with annoyance at Klinker through the iron bars at the foot of the bed.

"Blest if I pipe," said Buck, and scratched his head.

"I cannot both tell the stories and furnish the brains to appreciate
them. Kindly proceed with what you were telling me."

So Buck, obliging but mystified, dropped back upon the bed and
proceeded, tooth-pick energetically at work. His theme was a problem
with which nearly every city is unhappily familiar. In Buck's
terminology, it was identified as "The Centre Street mashers": those
pimply, weak-faced, bad-eyed young men who congregate at prominent
corners every afternoon, especially Saturdays, to smirk at the
working-girls, and to pass, wherever they could, from their murmured,
"Hello, Kiddo," and "Where you goin', baby?" to less innocent things.

Buck's air of leisureliness dropped from him as he talked; his
orange-stick worked ever more and more furiously; his honest voice grew
passionate as he described conditions as he knew them.

"... And some fool of a girl, no more than a child for knowing what
she's doin', laughs and answers back--just for the fun of it, not
looking for harm, and right there's where your trouble begins. Maybe
that night after doin' the picture shows; maybe another night; but it's
sure to come. Dammit, Doc, I'm no saint nor sam-singer and I've done
things I hadn't ought like other men, and woke up shamed the next
morning, too, but I've got a sister who's a decent good girl as there is
anywhere, and by God, sir, I'd _kill_ a man who just looked at her with
the dirty eyes of them little soft-mouth blaggards!"

Queed, unaffectedly interested, asked the usual question--could not the
girls be taught at home the dangers of such acquaintances?--and Buck
pulverized it in the usual way.

"Who in blazes is goin' to teach 'em? Don't you know _anything_ about
what kind of homes they got? Why, man, they're _the sisters of the
little blaggards!_"

He painted a dark picture of the home-life of many of